Best way to go about linking 100's of tags from a DB to a PLC UDT

Ignition
1

Hey all, I am pretty new to Ignition and was wondering about a few best practices when it comes to tables/DBs/sending a PLC the data from a DB.

I have a table, settings_parameters, that has a ~125 parameters in it which isn't much in itself but it is one of 15 tables I am working with (settings, recipes, data tracking, etc.) that will be communicated to and from a PLC, with many being editable from the Vision HMI.

For sending data to and from the PLC I plan on using transaction groups (seems like a no brainer as the best tool for this application) but I am not seeing any obvious way to go about linking a UDT or parameterizing tags within the transaction groups I need to setup, which makes me think I will need to setup each tag individually and link them to a tables column 1 at a time. Doable yes, but seems like I am on the hook for a good chunk of time just linking A to B one at a time. Am I missing a tool or shortcut I could be doing to improve this process?

2

I would create a standard Transaction Group based off of the UDT.
Then Shift-Right-Click the group, legacy export, and export it to XML.

Then you can use any text editing tool, scripting, excel, etc to make a template for generating the same XML structure based off of a few inputs for each group you need to create.

Then it is just a matter of Importing the generated XML back to the system.

1 Like
3

Perfect, this was what I was hoping for but wasn't sure about. Thanks for pointing me in the direction of the XML export! Does this apply to most other tools? I can think of a few ways me/my coworkers would be able to leverage this for lots of repeat work.

4

Most of the new parts of Ignition use JSON for import/export instead of XML, but the same concepts apply.