Historical Value "Playback" on DataGrids, DataSets, etc.

[du5tin]

We use DataGrids and DataSets/DataRows extensively to create views of disparate data for daily exports in Oil and Gas. This works really well for exporting the current value of a point at the time of the export.

It comes up very frequently (several times a year for various customers) that we need to export data for a particular day or multiple days in the past. Reasons could be the export didn’t work, or a group of EFMs didn’t transmit at the time of the export and we backfilled their data later. Grabbing and getting all this past historic data is a major chore inside Geo SCADA and often requires us to export history from all the points individually and manually combine the data in Excel or via other means. We can use historic tags in to some success but it does not scale. There are literally thousands of rows in most of the systems we maintain. Editing that many rows comes with risk and it is difficult to generate new data quickly.

I request that functionality be added to the datasets and data grids (anywhere we can display current data) so that we can “play back” data through time and export data from days in the past. This could take form in a user interface in the Home/View ribbons where the user could select a specific day or slide a slider back in time to see the values of those points on a particular point in the past. Kind of like Apple’s Time Machine but for process data. I would also like to request a way to query data  in SQL from a DataSet/DataGrid but to also include a Timestamp/RecordTime WHERE clause so we can query the data for a particular date and time and use that in SQL exports and Crystal Reports without having to create a dedicated historic data grid and edit the rows each time we need to get past data.

This functionality would also be really interesting if implemented on a mimic so we could see what a particular graphic looked like in the past and maybe press play to see the process values play back through the graphics to see what an operator sees. If implemented on a mimic there should be some sort of highlight around the mimic so the operator knows the data isn’t live but is coming from history instead.

[sbeadle]

Thanks Dustin, to be considered.