Category Archives: Guides

Dear XStep Café community! Recently an error was reported that massively affects loading and changing PI Sheets/Electronic Work Instructions (transaction CO60, CO60XT, and COEBR): The HTML control only displays the text ‘Loading…’ but the PI Sheet/EWI is not displayed. If the loading log is displayed no error messages are displayed. The message is missing that […]

Recently I read a question on LinkedIn and SCN on how to avoid scrollbars for tables (aka repeated data requests).

I recently found the question on the Google+ forum about how to find Standard XSteps which match a certain condition. In that particular case all XSteps need to be found which have an input field with validation and the ‚Never accept‘ error handling.

Recently I got the question on how to use live parameters to transfer data between two PI Sheets. Here is a little example.

There is a report available (RCMXDATEST02) to test all MDA stuff. You can read or write OPC tags or send MDA broadcast events.

In this article I show how to integrate material-dependent safety symbols into the PI Sheet.

If you have assigned components to different phases or operations you may want to get an overview of all components regardless of their phase assignment at the start of the PI Sheet or Electronic Work Instruction. Here is the way how to do it.

In this article I give you a guide on the correct sequence you need to follow when using process instructions of type 0 (no XSteps)

There might be situations where you want to handle the adding of lines in a repeated data request (table) entirely with commands or with function modules and tabular parameters. In such a case you usually want to avoid that users can manually create new lines by pressing the small button at the bottom of the […]

Once you create an order the explosion date for all master data is set to the start date of that order. Since this might happen well before the actual execution date you might want to change something on short notice in the XSteps section before you actually create a control recipe.If you have release the […]

To start with a custom stylesheet development the first step is to understand the basic structure of the standard XSL stylesheet which is used to define the conversion of the XML structure to the HTML-based PI Sheet you see in CO60. So here is a simplified structure overview which shows all major template blocks in […]

Simple example of a function module with tabular parameters to fill or analyze a PI Sheet table.

When a table in the PI Sheet has more than 10 lines the scrolling of the table content is activated. When you scroll down the headers of the table columns get lost because they are also in the scrolling area. This is of course not very user friendly. In the following section I describe a […]

When connecting external systems from ERP via the PI-PCS interface you might want to check the content in ERP first. Here are some hints where to look and what to look out for.

Once you have decided to enhance your PI Sheet with additional functionality using XSL/CSS you will find out that it is not so easy and quick to test your result using the ERP system itself (Downloading, uploading, maybe changing MIME types,…) It would be so much easier to try your changes on a local filesystem and […]

How to display the material description with 40 characters in the PI Sheet.

When you use XSteps to define PI Sheets or Electronic Work Instructions the automatic valuation (e.g. material number) and the generation of elements (e.g. material component list) are important features. To provide even more flexibility new custom-defined valuation symbols or generation scopes can be included.