Creating Alarm Acknowledgement Buttons in the .NET Alarm Client

Applies to: InTouch HMI, Application Server versions 2017 and newer

Alarm acknowledgement is a critical component of any industrial automation system, enabling operators to to confirm awareness of process deviations and maintain situational control. While AVEVA's .NET alarm client provides robust alarm management capabilities right out of the box, many applications require customized acknowledgement workflows tailored to specific operational requirements. 

This TechNote provides a simple demonstration on how to implement a custom alarm acknowledgement button within the .NET alarm client control in InTouch standalone and managed applications. 

Step by step process - Creating a button to acknowledge selected alarms:

1. Open WindowMaker and create a new graphic and open the graphic editor.  Drag the alarm client element to the graphic window.  We will be using the default name of the control for this example, which is AlarmClient1:

2. Double click the control in the graphic editor to open the animations dialog or right-click > Edit Animations. Enter the desired alarm query and click OK. For our example we will be configuring our control to display all alarms configured in our InTouch application: 

3. Back in the alarm control graphic editor, add a button to the control window by clicking the button icon and click/drag your mouse to create the button in the editor. For our example, we will label our button Ack Selected:

4. Right click > Edit Animations or double click on the button to open the Animations dialog. Select the Action Scripts option from the drop down menu to open the Action Scripts window:

5. Select the On Left/Key/Touch up for the trigger and enter the following script in the action script editor:

AlarmClient1.Ack.Selected("Ack Selected");

6. Click OK on the Animations dialog and save and close the graphic:

7. Your button will now display in the alarm client window at runtime and will allow you to acknowledge alarms. The alarm comment entered in our script will display in the AlarmComment column:

Creating additional alarm acknowledgement buttons:

This process can be repeated to create additional buttons using the methods below. Simply replace “AlarmClient1” with the name of your alarm client control and add the relevant line to the action script section of your button!

# Acknowledge all alarms:
AlarmClient1.Ack.All(Comment) 

# Acknowledge alarms visible in the alarm viewer window:
AlarmClient1.Ack.Visbile(Comment)

# Acknowledge alarms that have the same group name as one or more alarms that are selected in the alarm viewer window:
AlarmClient1.Ack.Selected(Comment) 

# Acknowledge all alarms that have the same tag name, group name, and priority as the selected tag: 
AlarmClient1.Ack.SelectedTag(Comment)

# Acknowledge all alarms that have the same priority range as one of more of the selected alarms:
AlarmClient1.Ack.SelectedPriority(Comment)

# Acknowledge all alarms for a given source and alarm group:
AlarmClient1.AckGroup(Application Name, GroupName, Comment)

# Acknowledge all alarms for a given alarm source, group, and priority range: 
AlarmClient1.AckPriority(ApplicationName, GroupName, FromPriority, TopPriority, Comment)

# Acknowledge all alarms for a given alarm source, group, tag name, and priority range
AlarmClient1.AckTag(ApplicationName, GroupName, tag, FromPriority, ToPriority, Comment)

For more information on the Alarm Client Control, please reference the AVEVA Alarm Client Control Guide (aaAlarmClientControl.pdf).