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DAQFactory User's Guide

Navigation: 1 Introducing DAQFactory

1.2 DAQFactory's User Interface

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When you start up DAQFactory for the first time, you will see a typical Window's window:

userInterface

Title Bar:  The area at the top of the window, common to most all Windows applications. This does nothing out of the ordinary, except that it will flash to get your attention if an alert event occurs.  You can stop this behavior by going to File - Preferences.  In Runtime mode, the DAQFactory icon in the top left gives you access to the Runtime menu.  You can disable this, and hide the normal Windows' Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons with the System.HideSystemMenu() function.  You can completely hide the Title Bar by putting DAQFactory in full screen mode (F4, or set System.FullScreen to 1)

Main menu: The menu area just below the title bar, also common to many Windows applications.  Most of the functions of DAQFactory are available through these menus.  Many of the options may appear grayed out until certain events have occurred.

Toolbars: These offer quick access to common features.  One toolbar is initially displayed for the most common items.  There are several other toolbars available as well.  Click on View in the main menu to activate them.  You can even customize the toolbars if desired.  Go to Tools-Customize... to do so.

Pages: This is the main area of the screen, which is completely white when you start DAQFactory for the first time.  A page is where you can drop in various components to display your data in numerous different ways, including schematics of your process, or complicated graphs.  DAQFactory can have as many pages as you need for displaying different parts of your data, or displaying your data in different ways.  You can even overlay multiple pages to keep important data always on the screen, or popup pages in separate windows.

Note: some versions of DAQFactory have a limit on the total number of pages available.

Status bar: The status bar is the area along the bottom of the window and contains quick help information on menu items and toolbar buttons.  As you move the mouse over these items, a slightly longer explanation of the meaning of the menu item or button will be displayed.  To the right side of the status bar are four other panes:

statusPanes

The first one displays the position on the screen in pixels.  When your mouse cursor is over a graph,  it will display the coordinates of your mouse cursor within the graph in graph coordinates instead.

Next is a panel that shows the amount of time it took to render the current page(s).  This is useful for determining user interface performance in advanced applications.

Next is an alert panel.  This, like the title bar, will flash when an alert event occurs.  

Next there is the safe mode panel.  This illuminates "SAFE" when you are running in safe mode, or displays "RUN" in gray when the system is running.  Safe mode stops all data acquisition, sequences and prevents access to many potentially damaging script functions.  It is typically used when editing a document away from the actual data acquisition hardware.  We use it all the time when customers email us their documents to review.

Control Bars:

The rest of the window contains what Windows calls Docking Control Bars.  These are windows that can be "docked" to the various sides of the main DAQFactory window, or dragged elsewhere on the screen in detached mode.  DAQFactory control bars also can be auto-hidden, and most are in this state by default.  An auto-hidden control bar displays a tab most of the time, but if you click on the tab, or even just place you mouse cursor on the tab, the window will appear.  You can then work with the window.  Once you click outside the window, it will auto-hide back to the tab.  Any of the control bars can be put in auto-hide mode, or switched out of it.  To do so, click on the thumbtack at the top right corner of the control bar window.

There are several floating windows that are not initially displayed.  They can be displayed by selecting the appropriate window from under View in the main menu.

Workspace: This is where most of the background parameters, such as connections, channels, conversions and sequences are accessed.  These parameters are displayed in the workspace in tree form to quickly identify which channels correspond to which connections, etc.  A list of the display pages are also displayed on the tree along with the components on each page.  This is a floating window that by default is docked to the right side of the screen, but can be dragged anywhere on the screen or docked to other sides.  If you close this window, you can reopen it from View in the main menu.

Help: This is another floating window that contains help information.  By default, this bar is auto-hidden along the right side.  Simply click on the tab to make it appear.  

Command / Alert: DAQFactory contains a command line interface that allows you to execute script functions, or view your data.  Use of this interface is optional, but often useful for those users who prefer this type of interface.  In addition to the ability to enter commands and see the result, this window displays error messages.

All messages remain in the window and are color coded depending on severity.  Error messages will be indicated with a red bar along the left.  Other messages have different colors, usually determined by the version of the ? command used to display a result (see 5.24 Printing to the Command / Alert window).  You can filter messages by clicking on the one of the 5 colors in the bottom right of the command /alert window.  This will make messages matching that color appear / disappear from the list.

To clear the alert window, right click on the window and select Clear Window.  You can also copy out of the results part of the window by selecting the text, right clicking and selecting Copy to Clipboard.  If the displayed line is too big for the window, you can select the line and right click and select Expand.

Watch: This is another floating window that provides a table for displaying current values of any sort of expression.  This is typically used to debug sequences.  The table contains 100 lines.  Enter an expression in the left Watch column and the result of the expression is displayed in the right Value column.  This value is updated twice a second.

Comm Monitor: The Comm Monitor window allows you to easily monitor serial and Ethernet communications from a docking window.  The window works almost identical to the monitor window described in the chapter on serial and Ethernet communications, except that to select the communications port to monitor, pause the monitor and adjust the other settings, you should right click for a popup menu.  At the top of this window is a single line edit box where you can type text to be output to your communications port.  Below this is a larger area showing the communications.  Please see the section on serial and Ethernet communications for more details.

Like the Command / Alert window, you can also copy out of the monitor part of the window by selecting the text, right clicking and selecting Copy.

Properties: This window shows all the available properties for the selected component(s).  Accessing the properties this way can sometimes be faster than using the popup Properties window.  In addition, if you have multiple components selected, only the properties common to all the selected components are displayed and changing any of these properties updates all the selected components.  This provides a quick way to change common properties of multiple components.

Event: This window is similar to the properties window, except it shows the event scripts for the selected component(s).  From here you can also add additional member functions to your components, a somewhat advanced feature.  Right click in the code editor to access Code Snippets.