Tag Browse Tree - Change Tag Names

[cole.young34]

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.

[lrose]

@cole.young34

Factory Talk SE system over to Ignition

I feel your pain.

@cole.young34

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 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.

[cole.young34]

@lrose

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

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....

[lrose]

@cole.young34

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

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.

Cannot read some tags inside Rockwell AOI

What Mike said, but also: Don’t. All AOI’s have EnableIn and EnableOut booleans that are locked to “Hidden” and therefore prevent most optimization of the data traffic to read instances of these data types. Ignition’s Logix driver cannot do bulk reads on AOIs. Do very much of this and your Logix driver will choke. I strongly recommend that any AOI you design yourself use one or more InOut parameters of another data type, with instances of those datatypes elsewhere. Place all of your extern…

Also, see this thread for some best practice tips.

Ignition & Logix Best Practice Tips for better communications

Hi All, After a whole bunch of issues I have gone down the rabbit hole of what is wrong with our setup on site. I will preface this by saying I a relatively new to all of this… so be gentle Based on much reading(such wow) I believe I have a list of things our site could take away for a better system. Some of them are easy to implement, whilst some of them need… significant work to realize. Especially the AOI approach in point 5 Before going too far and up…

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?