Custom tag types

Module Development
1

I noticed that SQL tags come in two types folder(6) and tag(1). Can we create new tag types?
Is there a range of tag id’s that are marked as user?

2

No, currently it is not possible to add new types of tags. You can make your own SQLTag provider, but it has to play inside the confines of the existing tag types and properties.

Hopefully we can expand this functionality sometime soon though, as we already have several outstanding feature requests (many probably from you! :smiley: ), such as custom tag properties, that would lead in this direction.

Regards,

3

I did have over 1/3 of the active feature requests at one time. :smiling_imp:

Have to start thinking of more stuff…

4

Just to get some creative juices flowing, I’d like to point out that if your purpose is to bring some sort of dynamic data into Ignition by writing a custom module, you do have two options currently:

  1. Write a device driver for the OPC-UA module. This is the best route if you’re actually writing a device driver as there are good abstractions you can use that will help you. Also - your driver’s data will be exposed to any 3rd party OPC-UA client as well, which could be very beneficial.

  2. Write a new type of “opc connection”. (Currently we have the OPC-UA and OPC-COM types, but you could hook into this system to provide dynamic data that looked like OPC data). This might be the way to go in some circumstances as it might provide a cleaner configuration experience for the end-user. This is how the MES module exposes its data model.

5

Actually, I was looking for a data type that didn't follow the normal naming schema or use the same tree icons.

My requirement is for a path name that has / as the separator for the user defined parts of the name followed by a . or $ as the separator for the fixed part of the name. I though the tree would look better if I used a different icon for the fixed part and standard folder for the user part.

So it was mainly a visual thing. For now I can just treat them as normal tags.

I wasn't planning on writing a device driver, but this sounds interesting for a number of other reasons.