[00:00] One benefit of using sequential function charts is that you can easily monitor their status and flow. The first method used to monitor a chart you may have seen a number of times throughout this course, and it's right here in the designer. If you have a chart instance running and you open up the definition for that chart, it will show you all the running instances for that chart. If you double click on one of the instances, it will turn your designer into monitoring mode where you can monitor that chart. While in monitoring mode, you'll view the current state of the chart elements. You can identify the state with this available legend in the top left of the design space. Additionally, you'll get access to this chart monitoring section, showing different chart and step scope variables and their values. You can also monitor a different chart from this mode, or you can return to the design view via this link up here. The other way to monitor charts is through a vision client. I'll go ahead and start up this LooperCount chart.

[01:05] I'll let it run for a while, and then I'm going to go over to my vision windows where I have a window open and you'll find in the admin section of the component palette, there's a component called the SFC monitor. This is available if you have both the vision module and the sequential function chart module installed. When I drop it onto the root container, you'll see a component that lets you view the status of all your running charts. If I go into preview mode, I can choose which chart to monitor from this list on the left hand side. The chart, this component pulls into view, depends upon the instance ID property. We can make use of this ID in scripting in order to monitor a single chart. On this chart monitor two window we have a chart monitoring component and a button and this button has a script on it, which starts a new instance of the looper chart. And the start chart function returns the identifier for that chart. It then sets the instanceID property of our SFC monitor component to that instance ID.

[02:04] So you can see if I press that start chart button, it starts a chart and sets the instance ID of our monitoring panel, which directly starts monitoring the status of that chart. And the way I set this up is simply by toggling the instance list visible and the scope table visible booleans, which lets me control just which parts of this component to make visible. And those are the different ways that you can monitor a sequential function chart, which is useful to know as it may help in better understanding how a chart is working or when you're trying to debug a chart.