Finding Tag Instance that is Writing

[TimWilborne]

Hi Friends. I made myself an unplanned learning opportunity earlier this week and accidentally had a tag in Ignition overwriting a value in my PLC. I turned off write communications to verify that Ignition was the source of the write, the used the Find and pretty much took them one at a time until I found the culprit. But I was thinking this morning, was there any type of write log that I could have used to narrow down which one was doing the writing faster?

I’m more of a PLC guy, in Studio 5000 I would Cross Reference then use the Destructive column to find the Ys.

Around 13:30 into this video into this video I discover that Ignition is doing the writing.

Did I find a Flaw in Studio 5000 Floating Point Math?

[David_Stone]

Tag Reference Tracker

Intro At ICC, we announced that, in the 8.1.34 release, a new tool to identify what resource in Ignition is utilizing different tags would be released; a feature we call the Tag Reference Tracker. The code for this long awaited feature has been merged and will be available in the nightly build starting the morning of 10/26/2023. The original request for this feature was created a little over 9 years ago and there were multiple variations of what people were looking for this feature to be. We …

Is this the kind of thing you are meaning?

[TimWilborne]

It certainly does sound like it. I’ll give it a whirl Monday. Thanks!

[TimWilborne]

Hi David. That got me much closer and definitely equipped me with some better methods that I could have used to verify that the tag write was coming from Ignition, especially the Reference Log count. I struggled a little bit with the Locate on the Active Subscriptions. How is it supposed to work? I right clicked the instances in the Active Subscriptions and it didn’t appear to do anything. Here is a clip with some details of what I did.

Ignition Tag Diagnostics: Identifying What's Writing to Your PLC

[pturmel]

Unfortunately, the tag reference tracker is focused on subscriptions, which come from bindings.

You probably need to enable tag auditing.

[TimWilborne]

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try.

[Chris_Bingham]

Additional built-in (8.1) tools:

• Find/Replace (Designer --> Edit --> Find/Replace): Allows you to search for any string within the selected targets. If your tag write is occurring from within a script on a View, you can search All Views. You can also search event scripts on the gateway, or within other tags, etc. Of course, a script might be dynamically building the tag path via variable substitution or using relative tag references, so a full tag path might not be found. In those cases, consider using Wildcards in your search to help you to identify the source.
• Tag Report Tool (Designer --> Tag Browser --> More Options --> Tag Report Tool): Handy for searching for specific properties across all (or some) of your tags (of a single provider). For example, you might have multiple tags are configured to the same OPC Item Path. Using Tag Report Tool, you can query for all tags which have a OPC Item Path matching your search pattern. The tool struggles a bit with complicated & nested properties (UDT parameters, alarm configurations, etc.) but is very powerful for most purposes.

[TimWilborne]

I hadn’t played with the Tag Report. Thanks for the top