Enhancing PI Vision Navigation: From Static Menus to Dynamic Solutions

Creating visually cohesive and seamlessly maintainable navigation menus in PI Vision can be challenging, especially when dealing with numerous diverse displays. Many users find themselves grappling with the repetitiveness and meticulous effort required when maintaining static menus across multiple screens. Let's explore some of the underlying issues and potential workarounds without stepping into full-on coding territory.

The Challenge: Static Menus and Visual Continuity

When you're managing an expansive set of PI Vision displays, consistency is key. A static menu ensures users can reliably navigate your systems without reinventing their paths every time they switch screens. However, copying and pasting these menus across 30 or more displays is cumbersome. Ensuring that each copied menu retains its position and alignment across different screens can become painstakingly difficult. This tends to break the visual continuity, which is a hallmark of good human-machine interface (HMI) design.

Navigating Menu Management without Coding

1. Standardization through Templates: Use PI Vision's native capabilities to create standard display templates. By aligning related displays to a common template, you can achieve better uniformity across screens.

2. Centralized AF Templates: While not completely eliminating the need for some manual adjustments, leveraging Asset Framework (AF) for template-based navigation can reduce complexity. Linking elements through structured AF templates can help maintain an organized navigation schema.

3. Utilizing Hyperlinks: Although this method could initially seem promising, AF hyperlinks can sometimes result in user annoyance due to the default behavior of opening new tabs. Currently, this requires workarounds that come with trade-offs in user experience.

4. Community-Sourced Enhancements: Engage actively with the OSIsoft community via forums and feedback channels to push for enhancements. User-initiated suggestions can eventually lead to product updates that might simplify menu management.

Alternative Approaches

While the existing workarounds are imperfect, they point towards the necessity of a dynamic approach built into PI Vision by design. Until such a solution is developed by OSIsoft, exploring third-party integrations or further customization through code (with the help of developers familiar with PI Vision and AF SDK) might bring viable alternatives.

Future Prospects

The possibility of integrating dynamic menu options as a core feature in PI Vision remains an exciting prospect. It would unleash the potential for creating scalable navigation solutions that mirror the high standards seen in industrial HMIs. Until then, sharing best practices within the user community and pushing for functionality enhancements remains pivotal.

In conclusion, while PI Vision currently presents challenges in crafting dynamic custom menus without delving into coding, users can still leverage standardization and community feedback to mitigate some of these issues. Maintaining an open dialogue for enhancement requests within the community could eventually guide PI Vision's evolution towards incorporating more robust menu customization features.