After some months in the making the latest version 2.10 of WebIQ has been released. We continuously strive to add more often-requested customer-relevant features and improve the user experience of WebIQ.
Here is a short summary of what’s new in this new WebIQ release 2.10:

WebIQ SERVER– Formerly known as WebIQ Connect

The first thing you’ll notice when installing WebIQ 2.10 is that we have renamed “WebIQ Connect” to “WebIQ SERVER” to make it more intuitive. That was a frequently asked point from a brought range of global users of WebIQ. Now with the clear naming it has become clear of what the purpose of WebIQ SERVER is: at the heart of WebIQ, acting as a web server and gateway between the HMI in the browser and the OPC UA PLC in the backend in a typical client-server structure. Here we go.

Top New Technical Features in WebIQ 2.10 in a Nutshell

We have added a lot of technical improvements for application engineers, HMI developers & HMI experts – to put it briefly : for all HMI creators, who work with WebIQ to create excellent HMIs.

Local Development Server Configuration

From now on local projects can be added to the autostart on the local development server and system users and listen ports can be configured for the local server with the same comfort as already possible for remote systems.
Furthermore we also added logging settings for the local WebIQ Server including changing the log file path right from the WebIQ Designer!

A welcome addition is the “open in browser” button in the server configuration dialog which allows you to select a running app and then with a simple click on that button the app will be opened in the default browser.

User Group Hierarchies

For allowing the creation of user levels we have added hierarchies to groups. This means that a user can now be a member of multiple groups at the same time by creating hierarchical structures of groups. A user in WebIQ can still only be a member of a single immediate group, however as each group from now on can have other member groups this is no longer an issue.

Shape Widgets

Our new IQ Shape widgets for ellipses, circles, hexagons, arrows, octagons, pentagons, rectangles, squares and triangles can be used to illlustrate your HMI without the need for external images. For all of them both the border and background color can be selected and they can be freely rotated and scaled.

New Responsive Menu Widgets

Our Responsive Menu widget has been retired (but is still available as a now legacy widget) in favor of our new IQ Responsive Menu widget! Finally this often-used widget can be styled completely using the IQ Styling inside WebIQ Designer without the need of custom CSS code.
The menu has also become way more flexible as it can now be used not only at the top of page page but also at the bottom (with menus opened on top of it) and on the right and left hand side of the HMI making it the perfect widget for almost any HMI. We also made it way more flexible so that you can also create menu entries with only texts or only icons and also add headers and separators inside the menu for a better user experience.

Localizations can now be multi-line

Previously localizations were only editable as a single line. This meant that when you wanted to use a localization for a longer text containing line-breaks you had to split it into several localizations and add the line-breaks in the IQ Text widgets where you wanted to use them.
Fortunately we have improved this so you can now finally have multi-line localizations inside WebIQ!

IQ Alarm Info Widget

The Alarm Info widget is now also available in an IQ version which brings a lot of styling options with several layouts to choose from. Also, you can now use different parts of the previous widget separately – for example for only displaying the current number of alarms!

Other Notable Features

Besides these main features we also improved WebIQ a lot with these changes:

  • The IQ AlarmList widget now features IQ styling options and can therefore be styled without any CSS code
  • The IQ Image Changer and IQ Label widgets now also support bit masks for the option selections
  • We finally added the missing operator “<>” for comparison operations in the CSS Modifier and Locking dialogs
  • For better information on which license you are using and which device it is attached to and how long your license is valid we added the display of detailed license information in the “About” screen of WebIQ Designer.

UX Improvements

We constantly strive to improve the user experience by adding intuitive features and streamlining the user interface.
Here are a few of the changes in this release in this regard:

Layout Manager

  • The navigation on the left no longer closes automatically when you leave the icon area so that you can also click on the text of the corresponding entry from now on
  • Inside the Layout Editor the context menu which was previously only available in the hierarchy is now also available there which should speed up editing your HMI.
  • Composite widget instances can now be edited directly by right-clicking on the corresponding entry in the widget list
  • For the UI Action “setLocale” used for changing the current localization of the app you no longer have to enter the name of the localization manually – this is now a dropdown list with all of the localizations available.
  • In case a change you made is not shown in the Layout Manager you can now click on the reload button in the top navigation to force a reload of the Layout Editor

Project Dashboard

  • Importing projects has now become a lot easier as we optimized the dialog
  • We have renamed the columns for better usability
  • We also moved the “Publish” actions into the workspace box
  • And we renamed the “Publish as” button to “Publish a Copy” to avoid confusion because you still continue working on the current version of your app

In the Recorder Manager we improved the item selection dialog so that longer items names are now visible when selecting any item.

Important fixes

Errors happen and the more complex an application is the more “bugs” might occur. And some things still slipped through our QA process, but have been fixed with this release:

  • With certain PLCs certain variables could not be imported with the IO Browser. This has been fixed now.
  • When using the IQ AlarmList alarms were only shown if the logged in user belonged to the group “admin”
  • In the IQ Label widget the options were not localized
  • The IQ Radial Gauge widget only showed green colors for the indicator and background lines in Firefox and the font styling had no effect as well
  • The color selection dialog in the Trend Select widget didn’t look as it should anymore and in the Trend widgets in general the unit was not localized

You can see all of the changes in the changelog.

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