Red Lion Crimson, tag source expert required

First the good news, I was looking for a problem that wasn't there, I reread the manual and found this:

Crimson will automatically read the corresponding register when the tag is referenced or displayed

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So I was looking for a problem and managed to create a test recipe system that gave the result I was expecting to see, doh!! Anyway after making the values retentive in my test system then it gave the right results, I was getting zeros in my data because there were zeros in the data. I would swear that I during my research of Crimson that I read that it only updated tags that were on screen.

So I don't see what all the extra complexity is gaining you.

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This is where I don't understand, I find the array method complex and a kludge, I guess if you are just keeping the data in the HMI then the array method is of similar complexity to my version, but as soon as you are writing/reading to/from memory cards I think the array method is horrible.

so I feel like I'm still not understanding your requirements.

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A simple, flexible, transportable, easy to use recipe system that isn't prone to transcribing errors.

If you didn't like my version that just used the memory card wait till I tell you about an idea I had last night. A 2 dimensional master array that looks just like my master recipe but with the data in rows and columns. Again it will give one version of the recipe program and you only ever have to modify the master array for any new recipe. First I need to finish this version then I will look at modifying it to work with arrays.

An update for those who expressed interest. I hit problems because though the manual says that:

Crimson will automatically read the corresponding register when the tag is referenced or displayed

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it doesn't always, at least not with the 'Siemens S7 300/400 TCP/IP Master' driver.

does grab the data from the PLC.

A GetFormattedTag(index) or GetIntTag(index) or GetRealTag(index) or GetStringTag(index) does grab the data if it is already in the HMI but doesn't from the PLC. After adjusting all the settings for the Programs and playing with all the driver settings I was about to fudge it by forcing the HMI to get the data by using a lot of PortPrint()s but then had the idea to run the 'Get' command twice. So gets me empty strings and zero values, but
gets all the correct values from the PLC.