First, a little about me.
This is my first real post here (I did a practice post a minute ago).
I've been out of the PLC game for a little over 7 years. I've been working fairly exclusively with Schneider Electric software during that time. I've got a new job and a new project that utilizes FT View SE.
Now my issue and question(s)?
This is an existing system. It is a distributed system (a View SE Server, a FT Directory Server, a Terminal Server for SE Clients, etc.)The customer currently has a spreadsheet where they are checking the status of CIP and Flushes on assets in their system to ensure the proper cleaning was done between batches. This is a manual validation process. They want to automate this via their existing View SE system. In short they want a screen that mimics the input worksheet in the spreadsheet. The operator would enter the last and next formula numbers here. The screen would then write this information to the spreadsheet and then read out the required cleaning steps. The screen would read that information and enumerate these into integer values and pass those to the PLC controlling the asset. The PLC code would then compare the required cleaning steps with the cleaning that has actually been completed and enable or inhibit the next batch accordingly.
I'm not familiar with View SE (although I had used Me a decade ago). So my questions currently are generally what is the best method to accomplish the spreadsheet interaction from SE? Since the clients are run on the terminal server where is the best place for the spreadsheet to "live" (on the terminal server, etc.)? Looking at the SE server, Excel is not installed and therefore there is not Microsoft Excel reference library to enable in the VBA editor. How do I enable that so that the Excel object model is available?
I have a lot more questions but I'll stop here and hope that I at least get some answers that will get me started. Some of the other answers will reveal themselves as I start moving forward.
Thanks in advance for any helpful advice!
Mike
This is my first real post here (I did a practice post a minute ago).
I've been out of the PLC game for a little over 7 years. I've been working fairly exclusively with Schneider Electric software during that time. I've got a new job and a new project that utilizes FT View SE.
Now my issue and question(s)?
This is an existing system. It is a distributed system (a View SE Server, a FT Directory Server, a Terminal Server for SE Clients, etc.)The customer currently has a spreadsheet where they are checking the status of CIP and Flushes on assets in their system to ensure the proper cleaning was done between batches. This is a manual validation process. They want to automate this via their existing View SE system. In short they want a screen that mimics the input worksheet in the spreadsheet. The operator would enter the last and next formula numbers here. The screen would then write this information to the spreadsheet and then read out the required cleaning steps. The screen would read that information and enumerate these into integer values and pass those to the PLC controlling the asset. The PLC code would then compare the required cleaning steps with the cleaning that has actually been completed and enable or inhibit the next batch accordingly.
I'm not familiar with View SE (although I had used Me a decade ago). So my questions currently are generally what is the best method to accomplish the spreadsheet interaction from SE? Since the clients are run on the terminal server where is the best place for the spreadsheet to "live" (on the terminal server, etc.)? Looking at the SE server, Excel is not installed and therefore there is not Microsoft Excel reference library to enable in the VBA editor. How do I enable that so that the Excel object model is available?
I have a lot more questions but I'll stop here and hope that I at least get some answers that will get me started. Some of the other answers will reveal themselves as I start moving forward.
Thanks in advance for any helpful advice!
Mike