Chart for Tile Dashboards

[JKSH]

The Free-Form Dashboard has the Chart display which provides a responsive live plot. It even has the option of retrieving historical data.

Could we please have similar functionality in the Tile Dashboard? It would be great to have a live Chart Tile to plot very recent data, in addition to the existing Graph Tile which can plot all available historical data.

Note: This would be the perfect solution to my query at https://forums.ni.com/t5/SystemLink/SystemLink-19-5-Dashboard-Graph-How-to-speed-up-updates/m-p/3997...

[RyanF]

Hello JKSH,

Thanks for the feedback and suggestion. To probe a little deeper here into the behavior you're looking for:

1. What is the update rate you're looking for?
2. How deep is the history?
3. Would you use this with Tags exclusively or did you have another piece of data in mind?
4. Just to confirm, a chart would be different than a graph (with faster update and limited time range) in performance because the updates would collect a single point at a time and not the full data set. Is that your expectation as well?

Thanks,

Ryan F

[JKSH]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for following up and sorry for the delayed reply.

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@RyanF wrote:

1. What is the update rate you're looking for?
2. How deep is the history?
3. Would you use this with Tags exclusively or did you have another piece of data in mind?
4. Just to confirm, a chart would be different than a graph (with faster update and limited time range) in performance because the updates would collect a single point at a time and not the full data set. Is that your expectation as well?

---

1. Short version: I'm looking for a 1 Hz update rate for my current project.
   
   Long version: I suggested porting existing functionality from the Free-form Dashboard to the Tiled Dashboard. So ideally, the Tiled Dashboard Chart would support the same update rate as the Free-form Dashboard Chart.
   
   Having said that, to future-proof the feature and to make SystemLink Dashboards as useful as possible, it would be even better to support a variety of update rates. For example: Let the Dashboard creator choose a fixed update rate, or let them tell the chart to only update whenever the tag is updated -- a bit like the Tag History View)
   
   
   
2. The tag history is about 6 million points (1 week retention, 1 Hz). However, the chart wouldn't need to display the full history. For my current project, 1 day's worth of data (86400 points, or 675 KB per channel) is enough.
   
   The Free-form Dashboard Chart has the option of retrieving and displaying existing history before starting the live updates -- this feature would also be quite important. For example, if the operator accidentally navigates away from the Dashboard page, they should be able to come back to the Dashboard without having the chart erased.
   
   Also, having a configurable Chart History Length would be a big bonus.
   
   To display the full history, I would use the existing Graph Tile (which decimates the data)
   
   
   
3. I'm only thinking of using it with tags at this point.
   
   
   
4. Yes, that matches my expectation.
   
   It also matches the expectation of my LabVIEW instructor who drummed into us the important differences between graphs and charts. 😄 (I know SystemLink is not LabVIEW, but it is good to have consistency between different NI products -- it allows NI customers to adopt new NI products a lot more easily)