FTView ME Loc Files

Hi,


Does anyone know what the underlying file format is behind the LOC Files used in Factorytalk View ME?


Thanks,


William

The LOC file is a Local Message file used by Factory Talk View. It's basically a spreadsheet.

If you want to modify the file you can open the Local Message file from the explorer window in FTV and copy and paste it into excel. This method will also work with Alarm Messages or Information Messages.

To Select all messages click the box in the upper left corner. Use Ctrl+C to copy or right click and select copy. Once you modify the file in excel use insert row to paste modifications back into file.

Hi,

Thanks for your response.

What I was looking for was a way of programmatically generating the LOC file using an Excel Macro.

When the LOC file is opened with Notepad, you can see messages in there but spaced out and a header that in ASCII form looks like nonsense.

If anyone know what format this was meant to be then it would be appreciated.

Hey. I'm also interested in this. Has there been any progress made? I was thinking the best approach may be to step through the cpu instructions with a debugger while the .loc file is being made by ftview me.

cRunchy said:

Hey. I'm also interested in this. Has there been any progress made? I was thinking the best approach may be to step through the cpu instructions with a debugger while the .loc file is being made by ftview me.

Click to expand...

That is probably the most ridiculous idea I've heard in a long time.

The file looks like nonsense because it is a binary file. Looking at the header: D0 CF 11 E0 A1 B1 1A E1, Rockwell is leveraging Microsoft's OLE file container/structure. I think most files in FactoryTalk leverage this format, including the runtime.

I have a project that interrogates/manipulates MER files using python and the olefile module, it does not do what you are asking. I considered generating these, but realized that I was going to be stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel as far as my time was concerned.

I'm sure using that module you could come up with something. Or you could make some template loc files and use NP++, the hex editor plugin and some search/replace.

Basically, a .loc file is a compound file compressed using LZ77 (or LZW77, don't remember). Inside the compound file there is a custom data structure, where the triggers and texts are listed. I suppose some kind of index is embedded to locate each text when it's needed.

For now, I think the best option is to follow the method described by by cwal61.

Edit:

Just now I don't have access to any pc with installed FTView, so I took a .MER file I have for testing. Probably .loc files stored in the FTV project folder don't use compression.

After some trial and error testing, I have managed to sketch the format used in the .loc files. I wrote a simple C# application and was able to create a valid .loc file from a csv.

I describe the format using an example in the attached pdf.

For who is interested, I uploaded to github the c# project I wrote for converting .loc files in .csv files, and viceversa:

https://github.com/NHatsen/LocRW