Replacing direct tags with indirect tags

Ignition
1

I have a project that displays about 250 parameters of a production machine in labels and text fields.
Each label or text field is linked to several properties of a opc tag; like value, limits, units, decimal format etc.
When my customer ordered the same project for 8 more machines I created data types and data type instances from the existing tags.
My problem is now that I have to click on every single label and text field and change all properties from tag binding to indirect tag binding.

Is there a faster, better way to do this?

Thanks.

2

You can get an XML representation of all the stuff on a screen by doing a select all -> copy -> paste into text editor. You’ll prob have to do a test to see what to find and what to replace it with to switch to the indirect binding. Notepad++ has a “replace all in all open files” feature to get a bunch of stuff done at once. Then you’d have to come back here and report the results…

Not sure if quicker, but definitely slicker…

3

Thanks for the reply.

I picked one of my numeric text fields with direct tag binding and copy/pasted it into a text file.
Then I used the designer to change the same field to indirect tag binding and copy/pasted it into another text file.

The differences between the two files are huge. Direct binding is 121 lines of code, indirect binding 331 lines.

I compared the 2 txt files with WinMerge and I can’t see a way to use search and replace to change from direct to indirect binding.

Thanks,
Juergen

The file comparison is attached.

4

Heh… that’s why I wasn’t sure if it would be quicker. You could use regular expressions and some sort of text reference file + sed, but you know what they say about regexes…

“Bob had a problem. He decided to use regular expressions to solve his problem. Now Bob has two problems.”

If this was something that you were going to do repeatedly, I would say some sort of python script or something, but you’re probably best off just doing it the hard way…

5

Only do it the hard way once, make indirect tags the first time! Haha seriously though, changing from a direct tag binding to an indirect all over your project would take some work in the Ignition designer. You can’t use our find/replace for that. Good idea using NPP though!