Build applications

Create the visual interface for your HMI applications with WindowMaker. WindowMaker provides graphic tools, a scripting language, and tag management utilities to define the behavior of objects that appear in your application windows.

Using WindowMaker, you can create tags that represent data points associated with window objects. Data from a manufacturing process is ultimately associated as a tag value. This tag data can be used in your application for alarm monitoring, creating trends, and determining how the application behaves during run time.

WindowMaker features include the following:

• Create and edit applications: The key element of an InTouch application is the window. It is the container for all run-time functionality. You can arrange window layouts for best monitor and control operations, build sets of windows as required, add graphics, tags, scripts, configure application behavior, and edit as needed.

• Fast switch: Test your application while building it by fast switching to the WindowViewer run time and to the web client. Edit the application without having to shut down run time.

• Graphics: WindowMaker provides a wide variety of graphic tools ranging from simple shapes that can be combined to create more complex objects to standard industrial graphics and graphics wizards with predefined and configurable properties. You can access CONNECT cloud-based graphics storage.

• Scripts: You can create a variety of scripts based upon their triggering mechanism. You can also insert predefined InTouch functions into your scripts. Use scripts to automate run-time application interactivity and application behavior.

• Tags: You can define a variety of tag value thresholds with the Tagname Dictionary that determines when a tag is in a normal or an alarmed state.

You can use WindowMaker to create standalone applications and also to edit managed applications. After creating a managed application with the System Platform IDE, you can edit the application with WindowMaker by opening the InTouchViewApp editor. This applies only to managed applications, discussed later in this guide.