What to do to obtain technical support for the Reliance system

Have you come across a problem while using the Reliance system? To sort it out, you can ask our support team for help. Below, you can find information on how to formulate a question to receive a relevant answer as soon as possible. Doing this properly, you can save yourself and the support team time.

Prior to contacting the support team

If you come across a problem and cannot deal with it, first perform the diagnostics of your visualization project (use the Project > Perform Diagnostics… command in the Reliance Design development environment) and remove possible errors. If the problem persists, try to look into the following:

• Reliance's help system and documentation.
• Answers to frequently asked questions on the website of the Reliance system.
• Video Tutorials section on the Reliance website.
• Examples of visualization projects supplied along with the Reliance system. Each example (there are dozens of them)
  is accompanied by a text description so that you can find the project's function very easily. The example projects
  (including descriptions) can also be downloaded from this Web page.
• If you have participated in a Reliance training course, see the relevant chapter of the video recording you received.

What information is needed when asking for support

The speed and relevance of the answer significantly depends on the quality of information provided to the support team.
To obtain technical support, the following information is required:

• The exact Reliance version number concerning your query, e.g., 4.2.0, Update 1. In case it is an unofficial version
  (Pre-release), it is necessary that you specify the version number including the revision number, e.g., 4.2.1.12295.
• Basic information on your PC and operating system. The Windows version including the service pack number and edition (32-bit or 64-bit).
• Additional information immediately related to your query, e.g., information on the network environment (whether or not computers are in a domain), PLC (type), OPC server.
• Precise and detailed formulation of your question or problem.
• Your email address or telephone number.

What data can help the support team solve your problem

• Log files. They are files that contain detailed information on the operation of individual modules. For information on how to configure logging options and where to find log files, read this article. For easy orientation in the files, it is very important that you state the date and time the problem occurred.
• Visualization project. In addition to your query, we recommend that you attach the visualization project or its relevant part if possible. If your project is protected by encryption, do not forget to decrypt the project before sending it or state your password along with the query. To compress the project into a single file, you can benefit from using the Backup Project Wizard, which is part of the Reliance Design development environment.
• Screenshots. Do not crop the screenshots. It could result in the loss of important data. For those of you who are using Windows 7, there is a handy tool called Problem Steps Recorder, which helps you comfortably record a sequence of operations (e.g., the steps needed to reproduce a problem).
• You can also attach a video recording that demonstrates the sequence of operations. To record a video, you can use CamStudio, which is available for free.

If the Reliance system's behavior is unpredictable or other than described in the help system or documentation, it may be an error. In such a case, please state:

• What the expected behavior of the program is.
• What the real behavior of the program is.
• Whether the error can be reliably reproduced (repeated).
• How the error should be reproduced (step by step).

In case the Reliance system is unstable, the following error message may appear:

Reliance 4: error message

In such a case:

• Describe the user action you had performed before the error message was displayed.
• State your email address so that you can be contacted by the support team of the Reliance system.
• In any case, send the error message by clicking on the Send Error Report button. The detailed error report will only be sent to the Reliance server, not to Microsoft servers. In addition, the report is always stored in a file with an .elf extension in the log file directory. If you are not connected to the Internet, hand over the file to the support team in a different way (e.g., email it from another computer).

How to hand over the query and related data to the Reliance support team

We prefer communication via email. Therefore, send your query and related data to .

Please choose a suitable email subject. It should reflect the nature of your problem.

Examples of suitable subjects:

"Web Client: server project version different from export version"
"Reliance Server: cannot print custom reports"

Examples of unsuitable subjects:

"Query"
"Help"
"Reliance"