I have an old project that I’m gradually making changes to with enhancements that we’ve made over the years to our projects. One of these is using a standard UDT definition as the parent for all of our device UDTs which defines standard UDT parameters and alarms folder + some device info tags.
This is my base UDT:
There are two issues with making these changes. Consider that my existing device UDTs that aren’t based on this new base UDT already have their own Alarms folder which is also defined by the base UDT
- If I simply add the base UDT as a parent for the device UDT, the Alarms folder is completely replaced with the base UDT’s version and existing alarms within the folder originally defined by the device UDT are lost. To get around this, I first rename the Alarms folder in the device UDT, apply it, then add the new parent type, apply, then finally I move the alarms from the renamed alarm folder into the new alarms folder and delete the renamed alarms folder.
- If I have already have a UDT that is based on a parent UDT (for example a specific pump UDT might be based on a generic pump UDT that defines all of the base tags) and I want to add the base UDT as a parent to the “parent UDT” (the generic pump UDT) (i.e. have two layers of nesting), then doing the method in (1) will not work, and will again remove any alarms defined within the specific pump UDT. I would instead need to do the same process as in (1), but for each nested layer. Very cumbersome…