Comtrol DM ATS-NTe - Manual (Page 36)

PC104 RocketPort Option 36
Port Monitor Files
• Hour Data: only variables with “Hour” in the name are included.
• All Data: all variables are included.
• View Data: only variables that appear on-screen are included.
The External Program field is used to enter a command line to run another
program after the hourly reports have been generated. For example, you can use
this to run a batch file that performs custom report processing. The Test button
causes the command line to be executed immediately.
For Day reports, the single and multiple drop lists behave the same, but your
choices are:
• None: no report is generated.
• Day Data: only variables with the words “Day” or “Raw” in the names are
included.
• All Data: all variables are included.
• View Data: only the variables that appear in the Port Monitor window are
included.
Likewise, the External Program field is used to enter a command line to be
executed after the daily reports have been generated.
The Update Time option allows you to set the rate at which the port information is
obtained and the calculations performed. There is a trade-off between Port
Monitor efficiency and response time. If you are using Port Monitor to view the
port activity on the screen, you may want to set the update time to 1 or 2 seconds,
so that the screen is updated frequently. If you are concerned about the monitor
program using CPU resources, set this to a higher value, (6 to 20 seconds) in order
to decrease the time required by the program to perform the calculations and
update the screen.
If Port Monitor is left active to generate reports, minimizing or reducing the
display area of the program will help reduce the CPU overhead of updating the
screen.
Port Monitor Files Port Monitor creates and uses the following files:
• portmon.vew
• calcs.dat
The default column layout is saved in portmon.vew. If you have been experimenting
with the appearance of the monitor screen, you can use the File menu Save option
to save your customized layout in another.vew file. You can retrieve this file later
by using the File menu Open option, or you can use the Edit menu View Default
option to retrieve portmon.vew and restore the default view.
All Port Monitor calculations are saved at program exit and on the hour in a
binary file named calcs.dat. This enables you to halt Port Monitor execution
without losing accumulated data.
Port Monitor also creates a \REPORTS directory. All hourly and daily reports are
saved in this directory, under the following names:
• hall.txt — hourly single report
• dall.txt — daily single report
• hcomx.txt — hourly multiple reports, where x is the port number
• dcomx.txt — daily multiple reports, where x is the port numb
Compact flash technology does not support an unlimited number of
writes. Use the compact flash to store applications but avoid using it
for file storage. If your application generates files, save the files on a
remote system.
Some safeguards are built into the program to avoid filling up a hard disk drive
due to growing report files. The monitoring program stops writing additional data
to the multiple reports if they reach a size of 2 MB. Also, the program will not
Caution