Fastest Way to Import tags from TIA Portal

General Discussion
1

Hey guys!

So, I’m trying out Ignition 8.0, our plant works only with Siemens PLCs (300, 1200 and 1500) and I want to know what’s the fastest way to add tags to the Designer?

So far, TIA Portal v13 can only export the tags on the “PLC Tags folder” (excluding any tag located on DBs) and it does it exporting them into XLSX, which Ignition doesn’t support.
Now, I tried converting it into CSV and it still isn’t able to read it.

Searching in the forums I got that the structure doesn’t match. “Cool” I said, now.
How do I get to convert all the tags I want into the format that Ignition DOES accept?

Does Ignition have a tool for that?

Keep in mind that adding 5000+ tags MANUALLY or converting the xlsx file to csv (and spending X amount of time formatting it) each time I want to add a new tag is NOT a procedure that I as a programmer want to follow.

Another question:
What happens with User Defined Tags? Do I have to create them beforehand in Ignition and it will recognize them automatically on import?

2

There is no tool for importing tags definitions from Siemens STEP7/TIA to Ignition, which is a shame…
I’ve been struggling with that for years and the ‘fastest’ way is to write a script for it yourself.
http://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/alarm-tags-bits/3435
At least with TIA now you can copy/paste tags table directly into Excel, delete the rows you don’t need and export to UTF-8 .csv.
Then with the script inside the Script console, you can import that .csv.
Of course, it requires some time and effort but it’s still way faster than manually adding thousand’s of tags…

1 Like
3

I think there is a MQTT comm driver for the S7 controllers now.

https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/109748872/mqtt-publisher-for-simatic-cpu?dti=0&lc=en-US

1 Like
4

Thanks! Sadly it’s only available for V15 and I can’t upgrade that easily to said version.

5

Thanks a lot!

I’ll check it out and see what inconveniences I run into.

6

If you look at the bottom of the page, they have the old libraries for v14

7

Yeah, but I have V13 :upside_down_face: