What is a Group ?

Definition

A Group is a collection of any number of related objects and descriptors that you want to treat as one entity. The members of a Group will typically have a number of dependants in the source configuration. These dependants may be templates, alarm numbers, report formats, VBA code, etc. and they will automatically become part of the Group. This makes the Group self-contained allowing you to either copy/paste the Group within the current configuration or export it to a file for import into another configuration at a later time.

Intended use

The Group has been included in IGSS to allow system designers to re-use groups of objects either within one configuration or between configurations. The Group offers the following key features:

Copy/paste of Group members into the current configuration
Export/import of Group members into another configuration
User-defined name substitution rules allow fast replication of similar diagrams
User-defined address substitution rules allow fast replacement of PLC addresses
Groups can be members of other Groups allowing you to build a hierarchy of Groups

We’ve included three typical scenarios for use to illustrate the functionality. Click here for details.

No impact on the Supervise program

The Group functionality will only be used by the system designers in the Definition program. The Groups will not be visible to the operator during supervision. The operator will only see the constituent objects and descriptors, exactly as in previous versions of IGSS.