Alarm Notification Templates

Templates can be used to define the alarm that is delivered via the Alarm Notification System (voice, email or pager) or via the text-to-speech feature. These templates can use a combination of words and replaceable tokens to define the content of the alarm message. Templates may be up to 128 characters in length.

Alarm Notification Templates and DialerLocation have been moved from Settings.Dynamic to the default languages file (en.csv). To find a template phrase in the Languages panel of the Application Properties dialog, use the View button to display the Key column. Template phrases use the original property names as keys.

You may still use these properties in [System] section of your Settings.Dynamic file, but you must insert them using the Advanced mode of the Edit Properties dialog. The property will take precedence over the phrase in the language file.

Alternatively, you may create localized template values as properties of a parent Context tag.

For more complex templates you can define your own hook module for most of the tokens. Refer to Alarm Notification Template Hooks

Separate templates are available for each of:

There are also two template configuration options that set the format used for the date and time if these parameters are used as part of the template.

The complete list of replaceable tokens:

Token

Meaning

%A

Area of the Alarm tag.

%C

Custom data provided by the application. (See following notes.)

%D

Date of the alarm

%F Full tag name
%H Short tag name
%K

Station number

(Part of every Polling driver, and Station type. Context tags used as site must be given a property named "Stn", in which the station number may be stored.)

%L

Opt-out message. This is be used only with SMS and EMail templates

The message is stored with the language phrase key AlarmOptOutMsg and defaults to:
Reply with "%0" to stop receiving alarm notifications.

%M

Alarm description

%N

New sentence for email and pager messages.

%O Operator

%P

Priority of the alarm.

%S Status of the alarm

%T

Time of the alarm

%U

Units of the Triggering tag.

%V

Alarm value (this is the value of the alarm trigger at the time that it triggered the alarm)

%W

Pause for ¼ second. Has no effect on email or pager messages.

%Z Setpoint.

Value (%V) and Setpoint (%Z) will use the labels corresponding to these values as stored in the record where applicable. If no labels can be found, the raw numbers will be used.

The %C token in a template can only obtain numeric and text values, not complex values. If a numeric or string value that exists inside a complex value needs to be included in an alarm notification, an AlarmTemplateHookC module will need to be created that returns this value. (Alarm Notification Template Hooks)

The Custom field can be set in a variety of ways:

  • In the Commission() call via the Custom field of the Alarm Configuration record.
  • In the EvaluateAlarm() call via the Custom parameter
  • In any Alarm<Action>Hook module by setting the Custom field of the TransactionInfo structure.