New in this Version 📣

Over the course of development, naturally there are changes and additions to the Ignition software. This page highlights any new functionality or modified behavior, but is not meant as a complete resource for new features. You can find more about these items by following the links on this page.

What's New in 8.3

Watch the video

Determining Your Current Version

The current version of Ignition can be viewed by visiting the Welcome page of the Gateway.

1. Navigate to your Gateway and select the Home tab to view the Welcome page.

2. Locate the Gateway Version under the Gateway Overview section on the Welcome page.

   note

   You must be logged in with Read or Write Permissions to see this section. If you aren't prompted to log in, you can select the Log In option in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

   

Upgrading Ignition

Upgrading Ignition is easy, but there are a few things we recommend to ensure everything goes smoothly.

See the Installing and Upgrading page for a complete guide.

New Ignition Perspective Mobile App Features

This section is devoted to new features introduced to the Ignition Perspective Mobile App. New versions of the app are released separately from new Ignition versions, so notable changes to the app will be listed in this section.

New Ignition Features

This section is devoted to new features introduced to Ignition. Any pages in this user manual that contain features that were added will be accompanied by a display like this:

New in 8.3.X

New in 8.3.0

Alarming

• The Runtime Alarm Metric properties are now available at the folder level and for all UDT instances, along with an additional 15 aggregated alarm metric properties.
• Added two new tag alarm modes, When True and When False.
• Added Twilio Voice and WhatsApp Notification Profiles for the Twilio Notification module to allow more options for alarm acknowledgement.

Drivers

• Added a new Siemens Driver through the Siemens S7 Symbolic Driver module that supports browsing and symbolic access when connected to S7-1200 and S7-1500 devices.
• The MariaDB, MSSQL, and PostgreSQL JDBC drivers are now bundled with Ignition.

Docker

• Improved Docker image support for third party modules, especially during container upgrades with the following:
  • Updated module identifiers to be fully qualified IDs.
  • Added two new environment variables to automate third party module acceptance across container lifecycle events.
• Updated the Docker image to be compatible with OpenShift 4 restricted Security Context Constraints.

Enterprise Administration Module (EAM)

• Added the option to use Leased Licenses (Eight-Character Keys) for EAM license activation.

Event Streams

• Event Streams are now available to use as project resources.

Gateway

• Added a -Dignition.gateway.externalModulesFolder system property to allow to specify an install folder location for external or third party modules.
• Added two system properties that enable the ability to query the Internal Historian - Quest DB directly using Postgres.
• Added a new banner state to indicate when Gateway Restarts are required.
• Added Gateway Deployment Modes to allow Gateways to have different running environments.
• Added a reference page for the Gateway's folder structure.
• Added a new OpenAPI documentation page at the /openapi endpoint, providing a dynamically generated specification of available HTTP API routes for external integration.
• Updated the Gateway sidebar navigation, along with other interface changes, for improved usability and layout.
• Added a -Dignition.gateway.rpcErrorDetailSuppression system property to filter error details from Clients and Designers as desired.
• Added a Permissions tab to the OPC UA Server Settings page to allow users to apply access levels to OPC UA devices and exposed Tag Providers.
• Added an environment variable and Gateway Network setting to allow Java serialization as needed for upgrading 8.1 Gateways to 8.3.

Historian

• Added the Local Historian as an additional historical provider option for time-series data.

JxBrowser

• Upgraded JxBrowser to 8.5.0.

Launchers

• Added deep link and File Association support to the launchers to allow direct launching of targeted Gateways.
• Updated Launcher supported architecture for Mac to Apple Silicon, x86 Mac is no longer supported.
• Added a new allow.uri.schemes Launcher JSON setting to support direct access to applications from the operating system.

OPC UA

• Added support for GDS Push in Ignition's OPC UA server with a gdsPushEnabled property now available in the OpenAPI under IgnitionOpcUaServerConfig.Advanced. When enabled, a user with the SecurityAdmin role is allowed to manage the server's certificates and trust lists via the ServerConfigurationObject and its associated methods. Note that the SecurityAdmin does not exist by default and will need to be created on the Gateway for this feature to function properly.

Platform

• The gwcmd utility -u command now supports unactivating supplemental license keys in addition to the primary license key.
• Added the ability to create Backup version configurations that will override master Gateway configurations in redundant pair setups.

Perspective

• Added a Drawing component to create and configure SVG-based vector graphics directly within the Designer.
• Added a Form component to create and manage interactive forms with dynamic validation, submission handling, and custom scripting capabilities.
• Added a Form Submission Session Event, allowing users to handle form submission, manage validation, and process form data within the Gateway.
• Upgraded minimum browser versions required for Perspective Sessions.
• Added a Page Details section to the Perspective Session Status Popup to display page counts, latency, and up time data.
• Updated Perspective themes to now use APIs for overriding built-in themes or creating new themes resources under the config-perspective-themes resource type.
• Added Offline Mode support in the Perspective App, allowing mobile users to continue interacting with cached project views and resources during periods of network disconnection. Offline Mode must be enabled in the Perspective Project Properties and is only available in the Perspective App.

Reporting

• Added a Radar Chart component to the Reporting module.
• Added a hidden property for the Page Object component to allow entire pages to be excluded from a report.
• Images can now be added through copy and paste in addition to the drag and drop method.
• The following components can now be used as either raster or vector images:
  • Barcode
  • Bar Chart
  • Pie Chart
  • Radar Chart
  • Timeseries Chart
  • XY Chart

Redundancy

• Added a -Dignition.redundancy.syncMaxAttempts system property to set a limit on sync attempts for redundancy providers.

Scripting

• Improved scripting autocompletion and hint details for system functions, including listing system library constants and identifying deprecated functions.
• Migrated the system.serial scripting functions into the Ignition platform, and removed the Serial modules as they are no longer needed.

Security

• Extra LDAP attributes can now be defined for the Active Directory, AD/Database Hybrid, and AD/Internal Hybrid user sources.
• Two additional properties for nested group membership lookup and group role attributes are now available for the Active Directory user source.
• Three new properties are now available for Ignition Internal Authentication:
  • Prohibit Password
  • Prohibit Username
  • Maximum Consecutive Repeated Characters
• The Administrator role is now automatically listed under the Authenticated/Roles security level when installing a fresh Gateway.
• Implemented a Secrets Management system that provides support for encrypting secrets like credentials, API tokens, and private keys. The Secrets Management system also includes opt-in functionality for establishing a more secure system setup.

System Functions

• Updated syntax for system functions that are only scoped for the Vision Client to system.vision. This affected functions under system.dataset, system.db, system.file, system.gui, system.nav, system.net, system.print, system.security, system.tag, and system.util.
• Deprecated system.gui.convertPointToScreen and system.gui.getQuality.
• Reconfigured dataset scripting to automatically expose all datasets as PyDatasets. The function system.dataset.toPyDataSet has been deprecated with this change.
• Replaced system.db.clearAllNamedQueryCaches and system.db.clearNamedQueryCache system functions with system.db.clearQueryCache.

Tags

• A new System tags folder called ModuleVersions has been added for EAM controllers to monitor module versions on agents.
• Two Memory tag Value properties have been added: Default Value and Value Persistence that determine Memory tag values on startup and storage behaviors.

Vision

• Vision Client settings now propagate on retargets to preserve launch modes, screens, and more.
• The Web Browser component is now included within the Vision module, and can now be found under the Misc category in the Designer Vision Components panel.