Writing String values offline

Does anyone have a vb app to write string values to tags in an RSL5K program while offline?

I worked with a guy once who had written one that would take a series of Excel cells, and read/write them to/from contiguous tags in a *.acd file. I thought I had pilfered it from him. But, I can't find it.

To further explain, I have a long list of messages that are to be displayed on a PV+. It is much easier to edit them in Excel than in the tag database within RSL5K.

Thanks,
Huck

Nobody?

Not sure of anything you can use to change tag values in an offline project file, but RSLogix does have a Tag Upload/Download tool you can use with a running or a simulated program.

The following link may give you some help and information/examples for concatenation of data strings. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/213477

This is for Excel VB and could be subsequently used in applications using DDE transfer. Just a thought.

You can do this with an L5K file and import it.

The easiest way to show how to do this is to walk you through an example. Create a new project in RSL5K. Then create a global string array of five strings, call it MessageStrings. Now save the project as an L5K file. Open the L5K file in windows notepad and find the MessageStrings array of strings. You will find that there are five strings all containing the string length and then a series of null ($000) charactes. Replace the string of null characters with 'Message 1' 'Message 2' etc and make the string length 9 (make sure you include the 'single quotes'). Now save the L5k file and return to RLS5K and open the file. Follow the prompts. Now look at global tags and open the string array. You will see that it now contains the strings 'Message 1', etc.

Once you step through it by example, you can create a file that you can edit with any text editor, then import your strings.