Result
Understand how to create time based manually entered Forms for data auditing and manual entry of measure value data.
Tutorial steps
- Create a new Form - in the Information tab of the Config tool
- Add a Tab - in the Form configuration
- Add the Hourly Steam Measures - to the newly created tab
- Open, Edit and View - the form through the Web Front end
Forms
Let’s create a Time Period Form for your Boilers. Select the "Charts" tab at the top of the "Information Model" view. Within your Information Model, as you did for dashboards and reports, you can create Forms within your structured model.
Create a new form in the "Engineering" Folder by right-clicking on that folder and selecting New > Form > Time Based Form > Hourly.
Name the new form Engineering Form Hourly
Double-click the new form definition to open its editor …
Configuration
Note the similarities between a Flow Form and the Charts that you previously created. Like Charts, Forms have 3 main configuration tabs: General, Headers, and Tabs (these were called Sections/Series in Charts)
A Tab is similar to a "sheet" in an Excel workbook. A tab can contain one or more measures. Let’s build the form definition:
Right-click in the "Tabs" section and click Add > Tab.
Name the new tab "Boiler Primary" by changing the Title property.
Now drag four Hourly measures from the "Steam Primary" metric from the Model View and drop it onto the "Boiler Main" tab:
- Temperature (°C)
- Production Rating (ton/hr)
- Production (ton/hr)
- Production Efficiency (%)
Like with charts, if you dragged the Steam Primary metric into the Tabs section of a Flow Form Editor, it would automatically create a section named "Steam Primary" and add the top-most hourly measures (since this is an hourly form). In this case, we are dragging and dropping individual measures onto the tab because we know that the hourly measures we wish to add are nested within the metric structure.
Repeat the process by adding the four hourly measures for each of the "East" and "West" Boilers. Remember to set all the measures' Title properties to [Name]
View the Form and Edit Data
Now that you have defined a Flow Form, open the "Flow Server" in a supported browser (i.e. Chrome, Edge, or Safari). Before you have signed in, you will only see the Dashboards and Reports accessible to everyone. You will need to sign in before you can see any Forms.
Authentication
Click the "Sign In" button to authenticate with the Flow Server:
After signing in, the browser should redirect to Engineering Form Hourly.
You know from earlier that the "Production Efficiency" measure is calculated from the "Production Rating" and the actual "Production".
Edit the "Production Rating" value to 14.8 for one of the hourly time periods by clicking once on the cell and then typing the value of 14.8 over the previous value of 14.5
It is possible to display an indicator wherever a value has been changed from its original value. Open the Form "Settings" menu (the icon with 3 horizontal lines, a.k.a the hamburger menu)
From within the Settings menu, select both "Show Version" and "Show Comments" since we're going to enter some comments next.
Wait a few seconds for the Flow Engine to recalculate the efficiency and click the "Refresh" button. Notice how the calculated measure has been updated correctly.
Note the amber indicator on the Production Rating cell where you edited the value and a similar indicator on the Production Efficiency cell for that hour. This visually alerts you to the fact that values are different from their original version - you already know this because you manually edited the Rating, and the calculation for Efficiency had to be re-evaluated, thus creating a new version value for Efficiency.
Depending on your values, you may even notice an up or down indication on the left of a Form cell - this indicates that one/more High or Low limit value/s have been breached.
One more thing to note: when you click on a cell, the border will change color - the color could be green (based on your Flow Server's "Selector" setting - more about that later) or it could be black. A green border indicates that this is an editable value (e.g. a Manual or Retrieved Measure). A black border identifies a non-editable cell, such as for an Aggregated or Calculated Measure, or even if the Data Engine hasn't processed that measure value yet.
Entering Comments
Double-click on the cell you edited and enter a comment explaining why you needed to change that value. Press enter to save the comment:
Flow allows more than one comment to be entered for each measure value. Notice in the form, that any cells that have one or more comments will display a gray disk. This gray disk displays because we enabled Comment Indicators in the Settings menu earlier
Note: Comments are entered/viewed for each version of the measure value. By selecting the specific version under the "History" tab, and then selecting the "Comments" tab, you can enter a comment against the version that you selected.
Adding a Template Measure to a Form
As is possible with Charts, we can also add template metrics and measures to forms to make them dynamic. Let's do this by creating a new Form (New > Form > Time Based Form > Daily) called "Engineering Form Daily" in the Engineering folder of the Charts tab. Open the Form's Editor and drag the template metric named "Steam" into the Tabs section of the editor.
Note that a tab with the Title [Name] (which is a placeholder for the metric name) has been created and it has been linked to the Template Metric named "Steam". You can confirm this by right-clicking on the tab and selecting "Show in Template" - this will find and select the Steam Metric in the Template View.
Drag the daily template measure named Temperature.Daily Average onto the tab you created above. You can only drag measures onto this tab that belong to the Steam Template Metric because the tab is linked to that metric. You can also only drag daily measures onto this tab because it is a daily form.
Change the template measure's Title to Temperature
Also, change the Form's General Title to Engineering Report Daily and change the Period Interval Type to Week(s)
Open the Form in your browser ...
Like we saw when we added template measures to charts, Flow automatically created tabs for every instantiated Steam metric that it could find. This is a scalable way to create Forms (likewise with Charts)!