Tag Browse Tree - Change Tag Names

Hi
I am currently working on a project converting a Factory Talk SE system over to Ignition. In the SE system, there is probably 20 pages of trends. Rather than re-create all the pages, I would like to give them a single page with an Easy Chart and a Tag Browse Tree, that way the operators can populate the trend with what they want rather than being locked into pre-made trends.

Problem is that all the analog signals in the PLC are udt’s with the base addressed as AI_S02_CH00. In my Ignition project, I created a udt that matches the PLC project.

The problem that I am now facing is that all the tags in the Tag Browse Tree are referenced as AI_S02_CH00.Value
This description doesn’t mean much to the operators unless they pull out the panel prints.

I found some other posts on here about the same issue, but nothing solved. Has anyone come up with a clever way to get around this?

Thanks in advance.

I feel your pain.

The tag browse tree component uses the tag name from the tag provider or history provider depending on set up, there is no way to change that.

There is no reason that tag names or UDT names (or structures for that matter) have to match exactly what’s in the PLC.

There are ways to use other components to potentially show an operator friendly name, but I wouldn’t say that they are trivial.

I realize that...now.
When I initially set up the tags, for ease, I modeled after the PLC and was used the following as the tag path: [{PLC}]{InstanceName}.Value
This made creating tags very easy using the Multi-Instance Tag Creator. I guess now in the long run, the time I saved, is going to be spent trying to either figuring out some way to change the names or creating all the trend pages....

Since, you're converting from FTView, I'm going to guess that your devices are also AB. In which case, there are some pitfalls to avoid when creating tags. See this discussion, it is a long read but very much worth it.

Also, see this thread for some best practice tips.

All good things to know.

As for you're other issue, if you want the operators to have an Ad-Hoc charting capability, then IMHO renaming the tags is probably the better solution. You can export the tags and then with a CSV file or some other means of connecting the old name to the new one, edit the names in mass, and then reimport the tags. I think that there are some examples of this floating around the forum.

Perhaps @nminchin has something he is willing to share?