RS Logix 5000 Tagging

Hi,
Newbie as far as programming is concerned.

This is all offline programming.

Totally from the beginning I am writing a program just for my amusement but I am struggling to understand the tagging of a TON.
I have named a timer and this appears as normal , I think.
When I use a contact for the timer in the next rung ( .TT ) the program displays the name of the timer .TT as well as the description.

The problem I cant understand is the name of the timer I would expect in Blue text and the descriptor in Black above it. However all text is Black.

On other contacts I have in the program the name is in blue and the descriptor is black.

Any help appreciated.

Andy

I needed some time to see the problem....

Tags with a tag name and blue text under them are aliased tags, meaning that they are just a pointer to another tag. To confirm that you can right click them and click 'Edit "tagname xys" Properties' The tag you created for that timer is a tag that doesn't reference another tag.

See the attached image, thats what it looks like on my machine. Actual colors may vary depending on your settings. If thats not the answer, maybe post a screenshot to illustrate your problem...

MaReKa,

Get the alias tag bit,
so when I tag a timer do I just select it as a timer in the data type of the tag properties.

I'd only ever noticed the blue with physical I/O before so just tried aliasing a TT bit and it shows the base bit in blue. So yeah it is an alias.

And yes using black base tags will work. No need to alias everything unless the lack of blue bothers your OCD

You can also change the color options in 5000. Tools --> Options --> Font color of the editor.

I typically leave it all by default, however I do change the descriptions to a shade of grey to differentiate from the tag.

So tag - black
tag desc - grey
alias - blue (default)

I hope you don't get confused by tag type and data type...

But yes, you create a tag of the data type TIMER to use it in conjunction with a TON / TOF / RTO instructions. Use [F1] excessively to open the help, I wrote a pretty long text that I decided to delete because i feared it would just confuse you even more ^^

Ask what you can't resolve with the help, I'll try to answer

And I totally forgot about IO being displayed blue

Mill_Control said:

No need to alias everything unless the lack of blue bothers your OCD

Click to expand...

Some of us think that aliases are evil and should never be used. If they were implemented appropriately in RSLogix they would be good, but they aren't. Their use makes troubleshooting and making changes much more difficult than using the base tag or using tags that are copies of the base tag.

Never thought about when and why to use aliases, simply never used them intentionally, but I think I will better open a new thread to discuss this...

IO tags are blue because they are aliases

Thanks everyone,
I got the answer I needed

Andy