CCW 12 and Micro850 Generic Arrays

I am working with Rockwell Micro850 PLCs and CCW. In our application we use various arrays for pretty much everything. Some logics require resetting them, or doing operations with each element. For code tidiness, we tend to refactor everyting in function blocks, and we have found that there's not apparent way for VarInputs to be Arrays of any size; you are always required to input the size and then of course, you need arrays of those same dimensions when calling those FBs.

Does someone know if its even possible to develop function block with generic arrays the same way some built-in blocks work (FFL for example)?

Thanks in advance.

I believe what OP describes is (yet another) limitation of CCW.

There could be workarounds but the are all ugly e.g.

• "Memory is cheap" => make all arrays the same large size (1024?) and then carry the actual size in a separate variable.
• "Buffer is cheap" => COP data to large fixed-size buffer array, and pass that buffer array to FB, COP buffer back to source data (if needed)

Thanks for the answer.

Ok, that's what I thought, and feared. I come from the microcontroller world and these limitations really get on my nerves. As for your ideas, memory isn't exactly cheap but thats more or less what I was defaulting to.

Second option is really interesting, but I can't image it being thread safe unless I develop some sort of memory management for that buffer, which would need to be global. Sounds fun to implement tough.