I am developing in Ignition while at the same time developing my PLC logic. Every time I create or change tags in the PLC, I have to delete the entire folder in the Ignition tag browser and add it again. This causes my tag connections to break for a few seconds while I reimport the tags, and this messes up my database. Is there a better way to do this? It seems like I should should just be able to refresh the device and update/import the tags without breaking the connection but I haven’t been able to figure that out. I guess I could import the new tags individually but that doesn’t seem like a great solution
That's the solution if you're not building an Ignition UDT that you can just add a member to when a new member is added in the PLC.
There's no magic syncing between OPC and Ignition tags or UDTs in a Logix PLC and its corresponding UDT in Ignition, if you've created one.
Thanks for the reply, Kevin. I figured that might be the case but wanted to be sure
It sounds like you are dragging everything from your OPC browser over into your tag browser. Don’t do that. It makes subscriptions for everything in the PLC, and usually bogs down your communications. Only create Ignition tags for the items in the device that you actually need.
That is correct. This PLC is exclusively for use with our SCADA that is being developed in Ignition, and as a result I’m using almost all (85%?) of the tags in the PLC. So it made sense to do it this way at the time but now you have me rethinking
UDTs in Igntion are also your friend to match tag templates in your plc (e.g. UDTs / DB’s? - I’m not a Siemens guy… / or AOIs, although note that comms to AB AOIs will always be inefficient compared to to UDTs). However you can also add other useful memory tags and parameters to Igntion UDTs as well as configure your tag properties for all instance from the one template, add alarm /history config etc so you’re not manually doing this for each and every instance