Equipment Parameter Field Character Limit

Hi Chris,
There are definitely plans to remove this limit. It would require replacing the current (dated) DBase technology with a more appropriate technology that does not have a restriction of 256 characters per column.
I'm hopeful it will be addressed in the near future. Definitely keep asking for it!
Kind regards
Olivier

Hi Chris,

We do indeed have plans to address this limitation, just a matter of prioritisation unfortunately.

However, we won't be just looking at expanding... oh no... we plan to do better than that.

In 2018 we introduced the Equipment Runtime Parameters, which have a row per parameter allowing each parameter to have a 254 char name and a 254 char value.

Our intention is to merge this and the "equipment parameter" field concepts together, allowing a significant increase in the number of parameters, value size and certainly a better editing experience. It also means your traditional "config" parameters will be accessible at Runtime as well.

Cheers,
bradley

Thanks for the reply, I'll keep the pressing from my end and hoping that with the push for more Equipment centric improvements, it should become a priority soon.

I'm not sure for versions v2016 and up, but there is a workaround in v2015 that exactly does what you want: increase the param field to 1022 characters.
You will have to modify the citect.frm file for this to make it work, and by doing that you will probably have some compatibility issues if you ever want to upgrade to a newer version. Also editing this field data from Excel will not work anymore, and copy/paste equipment rows in Excel is tricky as well.

This is the trick: The DBase standard allows fields to be set to a MEMO-type which allows for 1022 characters to be stored. It stores this info in an additional .dbt file. Citect allows this (undocumented) feature as well. To be able to use this feature follow these steps:
1. Open the citect.frm file in a text editor (it is located in the Citect BIN folder)
2. Search for: FORM "Equipment"
3. Modify the "PARAM" entry from 'readwrite_foreign' to 'readwrite_memo'
4. Upgrade the dbf files in your projects by setting Citect.ini parameter [CtEdit]Upgrade=1 and restart Citect Explorer

Afterwards, make sure that everything works as expected by testing every aspect of your equipment before using this modification in a production environment. Also, you have to modify every computer that runs Citect to be able to compile/run these modified projects.

Regards,
Patrick

Hi Patrick,
Just some words of warning when modifying the database in this way:
- Memo fields are not supported in Citect Studio.
- Their not designed for any parameter that is used at runtime.
- It adds additional complexity to upgrade and maintenance
Kind regards
Olivier

Hi Bradley ,

Any news on these plans yet?

One of our customers is heavily relying on the memo-tweak in v2015 SP1, but this obviously is blocking them from upgrading to a newer release.
I noticed that these "plans" have not made it in the v2018 R2 release and was wondering if it was on the list for v2019?

Hi Patrick, unfortunately no plans are in place yet. I'll give the product manager a gentle nudge to remind of this item.

Hi Bradley ,
Will this be implemented in v2020R2? I saw in the Beta that they added the definition of a eqconfig.dbf file in citect.frm, but this file is not referenced in any Citect binary yet.

You saw that did you...

Unfortunately we ran out of time to get all the i's and t's sorted so we have disabled it in 2020 R2. (No there is no way it can be enabled).

We're all pretty frustrated we had to pull it, especially given how close it was. The team is pretty keen to get this in the next release.

Sorry everyone.

bradley

Thanks for the update. Really sorry to hear that though.
I guess we will have to build our own Equipment Editing tools then on top of our already existing Equipment Generation tooling.

Cheers,
Patrick