Alarm Actions

An alarm action is an event that occurs when an alarm trigger condition is met. Actions involve printing. If your computer is connected to a printer, you can use an alarm action to print a chart. If you re-route your print output to a fax card, an alarm action can fax a chart.

To use an alarm action, you must know two things:

The name of the page or pages you want to print or fax.
The instrument or instruments you want to display on the page(s) prior to printing or faxing.

An alarm action is a character string that specifies which page and symbol you want to use in the alarm action. The forward slash macro (/) enables you to fill all windows on your page with the same instrument. The syntax for an alarm action is:

<page_name>;/<instrument_symbol>;.PRINT

For example,

MY_PAGE;/IBM;.PRINT

where MY_PAGE is the name of the page you want to print and IBM is the instrument you want to print. This alarm action displays the page called MY_PAGE, populates all windows on the page with IBM, and sends the page to the printer port. Notice that the semi-colon separates the page name from the instrument symbol, and the instrument symbol from the .PRINT command. The semi-colon enables you to display and print more than one page or symbol. For example, an alarm action can print several different symbols, i.e.,

MY_PAGE;/IBM;.PRINT;/DEC;.PRINT;/AAPL;.PRINT

Here, the alarm action displays and prints IBM, DEC, and AAPL. You can also displays and print several different pages and instruments:

PAGE_1;/IBM;.PRINT;PAGE_2;/DEC;.PRINT;PAGE_3;;/AAPL;.PRINT

Here, the alarm action prints IBM on the page named PAGE_1, DEC on the page named PAGE_2, and AAPL on the page named PAGE_3.