Our latest updates in Vista Data Vision

Kristín Einarsdóttir

May 5, 2022

Our latest features and updates contribute to our goal of making data management a breeze. Changes to the VDV hierarchy order, project filters, downsample for graphs, and making it easier to update Real-Time Display item as well as a big update to Virtual Variables, are all part of bettering our users’ experience.

Organization

New Feature

Changes in the VDV hierarchy order have been made with a new feature called Organization.

This is a top-level item for organizing data in VDV.

A VDV system can contain multiple Organizations.
A Project is connected to a single Organization.
Users can be given access to individual Projects or all Projects belonging to an Organization.
Login pages are now owned by Organization instead of Project.
A logo can be added to Organization. Projects will show the Organization logo unless a project has a specific logo set.

Typical use of Organization would be to create an Organization for Company A. Then each project managed for Company A would be connected to that Organization in VDV.

This allows for easy user access control to all projects belonging to Company A.

Owner renamed to Project

To better capture the nature of how users organize their data into projects we are renaming the Owner entity in VDV to Project. This will better reflect the nature of how our users operate.

All items in VDV are connected to a single Project (previously Owner).

New Feature – Project filter

In VDV, users have always seen all items they have access to. This means that administrators and project managers have seen items belonging to all projects that they have access to.

For larger systems, this can make it challenging and time-consuming to find a specific item, for example, Site, Dashboard, Virtual Variable, etc, since the user will have to browse through potentially hundreds or thousands of items.

The new Project Filter aims to make VDV easier to use for users who have access to multiple projects. This is done by allowing users to select a specific project from a list of all projects that they have access to.

When the Project Filter has been applied, every view in VDV will only show items belonging to that specific project. This will be a great time saver in many instances.

The project filter will also pre-select all Project selections when a user is creating a new item, for example, Dashboard. When a Project Filter is active, a new Dashboard will automatically be connected to the selected Project.

Users will still be able to select to view All Projects and then all views in VDV will show all items that the user has access to, just as before.

Graphs

New feature

To improve performance when viewing long time periods VDV now supports dynamic downsampling.

Downsample uses an Open-high-low-close algorithm to determine the points to display on the graph. The values are split into intervals. Each interval contains the first and last values and the minimum and maximum value. The reduced data is then displayed on the graph.

The number of points available to display depends on the width of the graph.

Downsample is optional and can be disabled if required.

Downsample example:

A single graph displaying five years of data.
The data interval of the data is 10 minutes.
Displaying the data without any downsampling will result in a point count of around 260000 points.
Using downsample, the same data will result in a point count of around 2300.

Downsample disabled.
Graph displaying 5 years of data.

Downsample enabled.
Graph displaying 5 years of data.

Real-Time Display

New features

It is now possible to drag RTD items to update their position on the map. Making it much easier than before to reorder RTD items in Real-Time Display.
Now it is also possible to highlight data group item on mouse hover.
Custom pointer icons can be assigned for Data Group lines.

Any RTD items can be dragged to update their position on the map.

“Focus on group hover” option is enabled in the Data Groups Configuration.

List of all the pointer icons added. The pointer icon setup can be found in the Real-Time Display setup.

Update

Data group pointer lines now have no point limit and can be customized by changing their color or width. A fixed option can be set to ensure that the line being drawn sticks to a 45-degree angle.

Create a pointer line for data groups with any number of points.

Using the “Fixed” option ensures that the line drawn will be fixed to a 45-degree angle.

Virtual Variables

Update

Virtual Variables now support creating equations using input variables with different log periods.

When adding variables to an equation from more than one sites that have different log period the Non Matching Timestamps option becomes available.

Examples

Previously virtual variables were only calculated where a matching timestamp was found for all input variables in the equation.
In this example where the input variables have a 10 and 15 minute interval the virtual variable can only be calculated at 00:00 and 00:30.

With the non-matching option enabled and a pre and post value of 5 minutes set, each 10 minute value will find a match within that buffer of +/- 5 minutes.

If just the pre buffer of 5 minutes is set then the 10 minute value at 00:20 will find a match (at 00:15) but the 10 minute value at 00:10 will not find a match.

See Help Documentation
https://help.vistadatavision.com/virtual-variables/create-virtual-variables#match_timestamps

Table

Update

It is now possible for users to reorder the variables in tables using drag and drop.

As always we welcome all feedback from our customers. Please get in touch with us on social media or send us an email at vdv@vistadatavision.com.