Indirect Tags in InTouch

krishna431 · Jan 3, 2017

I am a beginner in SCADA programming and am currently using InTouch. I want to create an array of tagnames, though I know this is not possible. I was wondering if indirect tags could be used in a similar manner. Can someone please explain indirect tags and how to declare/use them? I've read the documentation, but it would help if I had some real world examples to help me understand.

gclshortt · Jan 3, 2017

http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=63052

http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=78243

The above threads should help you out.
Regards,

krishna431 · Jan 3, 2017

Hi gclshortt, I've actually seen those posts before, and I didn't quite understand the concept still. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from my understanding, this is the format to declare an indirect tag:

IndirectTagName.name = LocalTagName;

now do we have to use the actual word "name" here or is it user defined?

arlenjacobs · Jan 3, 2017

Looks like you need to use quotes for the assignment
IndirectTagName.name = "LocalTagName";

krishna431 · Jan 3, 2017

Thank you! I understood how to declare the indirect tag.

Now, is there any way to use the indirect tag similar to how a loop variable works? I mean, if I want to display 100 different values or messages, I'd have to initiate 100 different tag names. Is there a way to make this more efficient using indirect tags?

lostcontrol · Jan 3, 2017

You can use string substitution for assigning the indirect tag.
ie
IndirectTag.Name = Tag + "05"

So with this example, if you had a structured tag naming system that ref elected an array, you could easily loop through the set.!

krishna431 · Jan 3, 2017

@lostcontrol Thank you. That looks promising. However, I'm still having a hard time implementing this in my application. My aim is to read a csv file and continuously save each field as its own tag.

[result = ] FileReadFields (filename, offset, starttag, numberoffields)

In the above line, would using an indirect tag work in place of the "starttag"? If the number of fields is 5, then I would want the same 5 tags to have a different value for each line of the csv file.

lostcontrol · Jan 3, 2017

Not really sure without testing, but suspect it may providing the indirect tag has been assigned correctly & there are similar tags to the indirect that are offset by +1, then it should..
If not, another way would be to possibly create 5x memory tags, read the csv the assign them back..

JaxGTO · Jan 3, 2017

IndirectTag.Name is a string so it would be set:
IndirectTag.Name = LocalTag.Name;

or by a string:
IndirectTag.Name = "NameOfLocalTag";

Jack.

robertmee · Jan 4, 2017

You're misunderstanding the use of indirect tags I believe. For your application of reading values from a csv you're still going to need a tag defined for each value. Once those values are in individual tags then you can assign those tags to a single indirect tag for display purposes. You could create a single display for example to show 10 data values for motor X. When you open the window you assign all the indirects the tags for that motor. You can use the same window for motors A to Z this way.

Indirect Tags in InTouch

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