Tag Groups across Tag Providers - Unique Names?

We have a large greenfield implementation with multiple PLCs, Ignition Clients and Developers. Trying to standardize and compartmentalize, each PLC will have its own Tag Provider. Within a Tag Provider, usually have a Tag Group for different scan classes. Let's say Slow, Normal and Fast.

Do these tag groups have to be unique names across tag providers?

If I create a tag under a new tag provider, the tag group list is empty except for the default and default Historical. If I export/import the above Tag Group standard of Slow, Normal and Fast into the new Tag Provider, I get these as options in the tag group list for the tag. But the tag quality shows bad "Error_Configuration("Tag Group Invalid, name=Fast")". If I change the tag group to Fast1, it works.

The manual only shows default tag provider examples, but I didn't see where it discussed across multiple providers, and searching didn't turn up a similar issue. Seems very odd that the tag group can't have consistent names across tag providers, but maybe by design, or I'm doing something else wrong?

What is it you're describing here? There is no export/import of Tag Groups as far as I know...

edit: nevermind I see it on the Tag Group config itself... I think I'm confusing it with something about EAM sync.

Anyway, the Tag Group name does not have to be unique across providers. Not sure if something went wrong with your export/import (maybe the groups weren't selected?) or what.

I thought this as well, so I deleted the imported Tag Groups, and just created one called Fast. Still didn't work. Gave same error. As soon as I rename it to Fast1, it works.

1 Like

Hmm, I'm not able to reproduce this. Give support a call maybe?

Its really weird. The "Slow" tag group works fine. Only the Normal and Fast do not. Both are exactly the same configuration as Slow, just different poll rates

1 Like

Spent a couple of hours with Beatriz. What it came down to and we could replicate it on my system was the name of the Tag Provider (not Tag group). If the Tag Provider was specifically named "Blending", then tags would fail when assigned various tag groups in that provider. Simply going to the gateway and renaming "Blending" to anything else, including "Blending1" would clear all the errors on the tags with no other change. I sent a backup of the gateway after querying the tagprovider DB and not seeing anything. Even creating a new tag provider and naming it "Blending" caused the same issue.

hmm, couldn't get this solution to work.

The final solution was restarting the gateway. That cleared the error even with the corrupt name.

This sounds very familiar, except I was changing tag group poll rates and it never updated in the connections to the plcs, they just kept hammering on with the original settings. Restarting gw did nothing, I renamed the tag provider and it fixed it, renaming back unfixed it. So now I'm stuck with silly renamed tag providers that are mismatched to the front end's remote tag provider names... :cry:

Yes, sounds familiar, especially the part about just renaming the provider would break/unbreak the problem. I spent about 3 hours on a shared session with tech support and while we could replicate it over and over on my system, they could not, even when i backed up the gateway and sent it to them.

The steps that finally fixed it were:

Rename the provider to the offending name and let it fault
Shutdown designer
Delete the .ignition cache
Restart the gateway
Restart designer
All was well.

1 Like