TISOFT and Wonderware 10.6

Good evening all.

One of our customers have been using TIsoft TI505 based plc's incorporated with wonderware versions 9.5. They are planning to make an upgrade to the latest wonderware version 10.6 aka 2012 R2. Problem is that the drivers such as TIDIR, CTI2572 although are compatible with wonderware 9.5 are not compatible with Wonderware 10.6. I have contacted wonderware for their workaround for this, and they mentioned that a third party OPC server such as Kepserver or Software toolbox can be used. I have downloaded the demo versions for both Kepserver and Software and tested them with Wonderware 10.6 and with a little massaging of wonderware item tags it works.

The little issue i faced getting kepserver or software toolbox which are really the same with wonderware 10.6 is data type mismatches with the item tag in wonderware that is usually used to reference tags that exist in the TIsoft PLC's. To correct this some items tags in wonderware had to be changed from Tag.0 to Tag/0 so that Kepserver or software toolbox can understand the nomenclature , but it was all syntax modifications.

So lastly i doubt their is a easier way to do this but is their a way to make it so that you can automate the changes by selecting some feature in kepserver or software toolbox as opposed to going through each item in wonderware and making the item tag modifications manually?? if it is a relatively small HMI application its fine, but their are some applications that have a high tag count and manually changing where the changes are needed could become very time consuming.

Let me know if anyone has done this before.

I would not do it one by one. I think i require a bit more information. Are you using Intouch stand alone or System Platform?

I would use excel to do all the syntax changes. We recently did something very similar where we went from a DAS server to SoftwareToolbox Topserver.

I would think this is your only option. Export your application to a text file. Use excel to create rules that will find the syntax and replace it with your new syntax. Re-import the application.

@ RheinhardtP thanks for the reply. I'll check if the InTouch is stand alson or a system platform. As far as exporting the application to excel do you mean using the DBdump/DBload to export the whole application? or is their an export method that export just the tag database?

Also Did you end up using excel replace capability to find certain syntax and replacing them or did you write some VBA code to do so let me know.

EDIT** i may misunderstood the DBdump does it export the whole application or just the applications tag database?

Very interested in this post. I believe we are doing the exact same thing soon. We are using same exact setup and I have done DBdumps in 9.5 to find item usage because the search utility is weak for tags unless comments have been carefully created. I am fairly new to this though.

dbh6 said:

EDIT** i may misunderstood the DBdump does it export the whole application or just the applications tag database?

Click to expand...

DBDump and DBLoad convert the database to or from a .CSV file. You can use Excel search and replace to modify the item names.

@ Bit_Bucket 07 thanks for confirming my doubts, my original idea was to use the search and replace feature, however that works well if their is a similar pattern with Item names, in some of my appliations the items names are quite different. I was just thinking if their was a universal way of of adjusting accordingly in excel or another method so that the item names will work accordingly with either kepserver or software toolbox. Looks like search and replace is the way to go, by looking for a particular pattern, finding your results, then another patter then finding your results etc.

First step is to get you tag references within a file format that you can import. DBDump for standalone. For System Platform Galaxy Dump now you can open it in excel. We used regular expressions find and replace plugin for excel. This allows you to be a bit smarter and define formats for the expression to look at.

Here is the excel plugin we used..

http://www.codedawn.com/excel-add-ins.php

Here is an example of our Floats: RDI_BPL123.40000 F converts to RDI_BPL123.40000@Float

'floats
^(RDI_BPL[0-9]{3}\..*\d{6})\sF$
'replace
$1@Float

RDI_BPLxxx was what all our PLC were called with some running numbers.

So this one would look for RDI_BPLNNN.anythinggoeshere.NNNNNN F

Here are the rest

'floats
^(RDI_BPL[0-9]{3}\..*\d{6})\sF$
Replace with
$1@Float

'characters
^(RDI_BPL[0-9]{3}\..*[^\-]\d{6})\sM$
Replace with
$1.2H@String

'unsigned longs
^(RDI_BPL[0-9]{3}\..*\d{6})\sU$
Replace with
$1@Dword

'sign longs
^(RDI_BPL[0-9]{3}\..*\d{6})\sI$
Replace with
$1@Long

'Sanity Check
^(RDI_BPL[0-9]{3}\..*\d{6})\s

Sanity checks finds anything that remained that did not have one of the above syntax.

Maybe not the easiest way but once you understand it and you can use it , it really makes your life a lot easier.