Ignition Perspective Pipe Tool

After the release of Ignition 8.1.10, we now have a Piping Tool built into Perspective. When we were originally asked for feedback on the Perspective Symbol library, Inductive Automation asked if there was anything else you would like to see. Our first thought was that we’d love to have a piping tool. Back before Siemens seemingly dropped any and all support/marketing for their WinCC Open Architecture platform, one of it’s “wow” factors was an excellent piping tool. By comparison, it was frustrating to draw lines in Vision.

Now, we have a native piping tool in Ignition. Paired with the equipment symbols, Ignition Perspective opens up some interesting design aesthetic choices.

To use the piping tool, you need to use a Coordinate Container in the Designer. The coordinate container can either be a coordinate view, or a container contained in another view. The key item to note is that pipes are drawn on the bottom z-layer of the container. This means that there are some limitations with how pipes can interact with other graphic elements.

Drawing Pipes in Ignition Perspective

In this post, we will review the docs for the Pipe Tool. To draw a pipe, navigate to the toolbar at the top of the Designer Window and click the “Pipe Drawing Tool” icon:

Then, click on your coordinate container to place a pipe node. Once you have created a node, you can either click on the circle to select it, then delete it with the delete key, or drag and move it on the container and release to drop it at a new location:

Once the pipe node is where you want it, you can use the arrows around the node to extend a pipe segment in that direction, and do the same as new nodes are added to your existing pipe:

You can also add a node to an existing pipe segment. When you hover over the segment with the pipe tool active, you will see the segment highlight in light blue. If you drop the node, you can then extend a segment from the new node. The pipe will have a new connection made with a “T” shape:

You can also create non-orthogonal pipes by clicking a node with other pipe segments attach. Then, while holding shift, you can drag the node and the pipes will move along with it:

Moving Pipes in Ignition Perspective

If you draw other graphics on the screen in combination with pipes, you will likely need to move the pipes at some point. You can use the “Pipe Move” tool next to the Pipe Draw Tool on the toolbar to accomplish this task:

Pipes and Symbols

The equipment symbols in Ignition Perspective are specially configured to work with the Pipe Tool. You will see red + signs show up on various points of each symbol when the Pipe Tool is active. If you hover over the + signs, the Pipe Tool will snap to those locations giving you a pre-determined and consistent point for drawing pipes on each symbol. Note that the pipes aren’t “connected” to the symbol—moving the symbol will not move the corresponding pipe connections. We’re looking forward to this changing in a future release.

As you play around with the other components in Ignition Perspective, you will see they also have connection points at the N/S/E/W locations of each graphic allowing you to snap to any object in Perspective with a pipe as needed.

Example components in Ignition Perspective with pipe connection points

Pipe Properties

The Property Editor will show you the properties for the pipes that you’ve drawn, and easily allow you to easily change their appearance. You will also see a “Pipes” object on the View hierarchy along with the connections on the pipe segments. Each individual pipe you draw and build connections from will show up in this list. You can also adjust the location of the various nodes and connections here if you prefer to do the pixel calculations yourself.

Pipe Tool Limitations

The only notable limitations at the moment seem to be that since the pipes aren’t connected to other objects on the screen, you need to move the pipes separately, or re-draw them if you adjust any of the other graphics. One workaround is to build your pipe-related graphics in a separate coordinate container that you can move around the window as needed. This approach will also allow you to build complex piping schemes and layer graphics in a more granular way instead of created them all together in the main view.

The other limitation of the Ignition Perspective Pipe Tool is that it is difficult to connect a different segment of pipe to an existing pipe. This means that tasks like drawing a square of pipe is a hassle. You can fuss with the pipe to minimize hard lines, then adjust the connection points manually in the property editor to make it look better, but it would still be very helpful to have a purpose built feature for this out of the box. If you read through the documentation, you’ll notice none of the illustrations and examples use this type of connection. Maybe this will be fixed in 8.1.11? Here’s an example graphic below, notice the not-connected pipe in the top middle of the image:

We’ll keep an eye on future releases to see if Inductive Automation fixes the couple of very minor gripes we have with the Perspective pipe tool. Overall it works really well and makes it easy to build the P&ID style screens everyone wants—especially since most folks don’t actually choose the High Performance HMI graphics route. But, that is an argument for another day.

Updated 12/27/2022