Ignition 8.1.43: Gateway Trial Status Indicator, Mitsubishi Driver Update, New OAuth2 & OIDC Response Mode

It’s the release train’s final shipment before the Ignition Community Conference in September, so you know it brought the good stuff!

Ignition 8.1.43 delivers convenient visibility of your Gateway’s trial status, greater configurability for the Mitsubishi Driver, a new response mode for OAuth2 and OIDC, and more!

Gateway Trial Status Indicator

For any developer who’s been frustrated by not realizing their free Ignition trial has expired (and lost valuable development time as a result) — this one’s for you! 8.1.43 includes a persistent indicator in the designer to keep you informed about the status of your Gateway’s trial mode.

Now, when your two-hour trial expires, you’ll be immediately alerted via a pop-up corner notification, so that you can reset your trial and continue working on your project without missing a beat. The remaining time left in your trial will be displayed in the designer’s status bar while your trial is still valid, and once your trial expires, you’ll see a status of “Trial Expired.” And to make things as simple as possible, the status indicator includes a link to the Gateway so you can easily reset your trial.

This time-saving update will help make countless users’ workflows smoother, and it all came as a result of an Ignition user posting on LinkedIn about his desire to see this functionality come to fruition. Inductive Automation’s CEO Colby Clegg noticed the post and jumped into the conversation, saying he was sure we could do something about this. Less than three weeks later, this user’s dream of trial expiration notifications became a reality in Ignition’s nightly release.

Mitsubishi Driver Configurable Settings

We added new functionality to Ignition so that you can now configure MELSEC Access Route settings in the Mitsubishi Driver. Previously, these settings were hardcoded, but we’ve implemented this update to offer users greater control.

The new options let you target PLCs in a multi-drop configuration as well as specific CPU modules in multi-CPU systems. This ability would let you, for example, add a station number so that your Ignition system could communicate with sub-PLCs (rather than only being able to communicate with the main PLC). Ultimately, the increased configurability makes it easier to customize your architecture to your precise needs.

New Response Mode For OAuth2 & OIDC

8.1.43 delivers a more secure way to receive authorization responses with an additional supported response type for both OAuth2 and OIDC identity providers. Now, you can accept the response_mode of form_post from both of these identity providers through your web browser.

This update helps boost your system’s security, as it reduces the potential for the parameters to be leaked in logs along the network path during transmission. The parameters are encoded in the body of a POST request, which are less likely to leak in logs or be stored in browser history. Before, the only option was to encode these parameters as query parameters in the URL of an HTTP GET request to the Gateway.

The new functionality also helps increase your interoperability, since some IdPs may support this standards-based mechanism.

Honorable Mentions

There are three more updates to call your attention to in 8.1.43.

Development License Banner

Now, when an Ignition development license is active, there will be a banner displayed on Gateway web interface pages to alert you to that.

EAM & Redundancy

8.1.43 includes the -Dignition.redundancy.restoreFileTTL Java additional parameter, so you can control the TTL of restore files created by backup/restore operations (including redundancy) on disk. Previously, the lifespan for restore files was fixed at 20 minutes maximum. Now, you have the ability to specify a minute value, in order to accommodate Gateways that exceed that timespan in their shutdown/startup cycle.

Gateway Performance Monitor Logger

We’ve added a logger to Gateway.PerformanceMonitor, which the IA Support Team will be able to use to speed up your troubleshooting process if your CPU monitoring visuals start behaving strangely. Support will be able to help you turn this logger to TRACE and see exactly what your elapsed, systemTime, and lastSystemTime variables look like.

The Wheel Of Updates Keeps Turning

Find out more about these updates in the 8.1.43 release notes and the Ignition user manual. And if you were inspired by the user who voiced his request and got his desired feature added to Ignition, head over to the ideas portal and let us know what you want to see in Ignition. The Ignition 8.1.44 release train is set to pull into the station a little before Halloween, with some spooktacular new features.