Trapping alarms from other process (take 2)

[TRL]

Hi, I'm trying to get Process1 to read an alarm message generated by Process2. Process1 sees in $Alarm that a new alarm has been generated but cannot retrieve the message, processname or area (they are all blank). This question was also posted as "Trapping alarms from other process" in May 03. There was a NI response that this was not the expected behavior and this will be fixed. Is this still the case?

[Kristi_P]

Hello,

This behavior will not be changed in the future versions because other users may be depending upon this functionality. In other words, we would not want to change the behavior of the system in a way that would cause problems for users who are now expecting this behavior.

If you have any other questions, please post a reply.

Regards,

Kristi H
Applications Engineer

[TRL]

Thanks for the response. A possible solution could be to add a writable tag in the $Alarm object to allow reading of other processes alarms only if this bit is set. That way, any currently written processes would not need to be altered as their behavior is not effected because they do not know or care about this bit.

I could understand if you do not want to add this feature for security reasons.

[Khalid]

Another option would be to add the functionality where the $Alarm is truly global. I.e., have a new global alram entity, say, $GlobalAlarms, at the topmost level alongside $System and $Keyboard.

This $GlobalAlarms would then list alarms and all their info' from ALL processes. Seems like a real handy feature to have.

IMHO, the current feature is misleading because when an alarm occurs in a different process, the Alarm.active count goes up but not the rest of the alarm info. At the very least there should be some way to find out which process the latest alarm occured.

Regards,

Khalid