multiple screens - navigation and driver

[robkwan]

Need tips to handle multiple screens. The application has 4 screens; each screen has previous and next buttons to cycle the screens.

1) I am thinking of having a greeting class/screen to instantiate all 4 screens and set visible to false. After a few seconds, greeting screen goes invisible and screen1 is visible. The previous and next buttons will just change the screen visible property.

2) It seems each screen needs to have a modbusTCPCom component, no good. Is it possible to have only one for all the screens to use?

3) The HMI app runs on two computers (local and remote). The local computer can access all r/w Modbus registers, but the remote computer can only access the r Modbus registers. Is there a better way to handle this other than setting all the write PLCAddress to blank?

4) How to get the FormChangeButton control show up on the toolbar?

[Archie]

The drivers are designed to use 1 instance per form. In order to use one instance you would have to write all of your own code to handle subscriptions and route the updates to the other screens. In other words, you would not be able to use any of the PLCAddress properties.

The FormChangeButton is in the ToolBox, but under the AdvancedHMI group.

[robkwan]

I had to check "Show All" on toolbar to see the AdvancedHMI group, but the FormChangeButton item is grayed out.

[Archie]

Are you working with the default AdvancedHMI project?

[robkwan]

No, I added my project to it. It is available in the default AdvancedHMI project, but grayed out on my project.
I even copied and added FormChangeButton.vb to my project, still grayed out on the toolbar.

[Archie]

If you added an existing project to the solution then there must be missing references. Check the references in the default project and compare them to your project you added.