Reference Item names in Equipment editor?

Stuart,

I had to lookup WET vs DRY programming. Thank you. I learned something today!

From what I gather from some of the salespeople I've dealt with over the years, they have the mentality that once the PLC code is done, it never changes and thats when the HMI guys do their thing. We've never operated this way and in fact we never could. PLC programmers here need to simulate their code and see how it reacts as the operators would see it react. Generally I dont start developing until their code is 70-80% done, so, while I will have to make changes, they arent drastic. But the biggest pain is always keeping that tagDB up to date. But, we do spend alot of time developing alongside each other making sure we've got a rock solid product we cant stand behind and deliver to our customers.

Whatever little tricks we could get would be beneficial. 

Now once its commissioned, running and proven itself, things rarely change. 

Nick, regarding your last statement, I wrote a converter that does this the opposite way. It's takes in both the variable tags and the equipment exported out of the Citect IDE and converts them to a UDT (.L5X file). The only prerequisite is that you'd need to add common prefix in the address field like you would if you referenced a tag structure. Then all you need to do in the PLC is import the UDT, create one tag of that type and all of the Citect tags are in the PLC.

We needed this because we build the HMI first, that defines the logic functions and features. We also use nothing but the equipment model so it's easy to maintain. It's also helpful if you've got several PLC vendors, can just send them the UDT for import and tag creation.

There is work in the PLC, but I just use Excel to build a ST routine to moves the data, then copy/paste into the PLC.

There are downfalls to this approach, such as if you need to update the UDT, must do that off line to import/overwrite, and it will not save any tuning or setpoint values. But we have a workaround the the later. 

Chris,

Interesting. We've always done it completely backwards of you. The first thing I thought of was yeah, if you update a UDT you have to redownload to the PLC. Altho, i've never used excel to build an ST, but now I'm going to try

Thanks for the breadcrumb!

-Nick