Our facility is considering an upgrade from our current Intellution FIX32 system to the latest version of iFIX as part of a capital project. Has anyone had experience with making this transistion? Good, bad, indifferent? Our database contains about 1200 tags, and we don't use a lot of scripting, so our experience may prove simpler than others. Cheers, Dean ______________________ Dean Reimer Process/Project Engineer BPB Westroc Inc.

 

I am in the process of upgrading a clients installation of Fix32 to iFix. The tag database upgrades seamlessly. One of the greatest iFix features is that the Tag database exports/imports to a CSV file with no problems at all. It also imports the gdb style exports from Fix32. The screens convert but, not very well. I had many elements magically change - buttons changed size, colors were not the same colors, text was displayed differently even though it was the same font (often stretched). If you have lots of screens or bunches of elements on the screens, you may want to try to get your vendor to convert them to see how much corrective work is involved before you decide. Also, don't expect any scripting to convert. It all comes over as comments. But, the scripting is rarely the same as the new VB commands so you can't just uncomment the scripts. Further, there is no concise guide informing you as to what new commands replace the old commands. In fact, I have found the documentation for iFix to be ambiguous and extreemly wanting. FYI, the app I converted had approximately 8,000 tags and 188 screens. The conversion was primarily to utilize the VB/COM and enhanced logging capabilities of iFix. One really cool aspect is that you can write and execute VB code in the development environment. I altered the naming structure for all tags during the conversion and needed a quick way to update all tags attached to screen objects. I was able to write a VB procedure to Search all of the screens for old tagnames and replace them with the new tagnames from a csv file. <a href="mailto:[email protected]">John Allen</a> Project Engineer Intelligent Products & Systems