Factory Talk Devious Programming or Higher Level?

I have 5 years of experience as a contactor troubleshooting many flavors of HMI and PLC code. I am now working at a plant and we have this one machine that was outsourced to a company and the logic uses all kind of weird nick nack tricks that make it very difficult to follow for anyone outside engineering.

Anyways here is my question. I have an HMI with a Piloted List Selector. Inside the connections are tags {#1} for value and tag {#2} for enter. I recognize the pound sign as using a parameter file. I can not run the screen using the play button to figure out where it is tied to or what it is doing because when I hit play it asks me to use a parameter file and there are 100s in the HMI program.

Next I go to the States tab of the list. I was actually able to figure out the connection here as this is what are in each state.
state 1 is 1: /*S:0 {[PLC1]ModelData[1].DrawingNumber}*/ /*S:0 {[PLC1]ModelData[1].AspiratorAssyNumber}*/ /*S:0 {[PLC1]ModelData[1].WheelDrive}*/WD

state 2 is 2: /*S:0 {[PLC1]ModelData[2].DrawingNumber}*/ /*S:0 {[PLC1]ModelData[2].AspiratorAssyNumber}*/ /*S:0 {[PLC1]ModelData[2].WheelDrive}*/WD

state 3 is 3: /*S:0 {[PLC1]ModelData[3].DrawingNumber}*/ /*S:0 {[PLC1]ModelData[3].AspiratorAssyNumber}*/ /*S:0 {[PLC1]ModelData[3].WheelDrive}*/WD

I recognized this right away as a user defined datatype in the plc and away I went to the issue at hand and solved it.

I am having two problems.

1) How do I figure out which parameter file is linked to a screen.
2) why would you put a tag in the states section and what the heck is this programmer doing.

I just noticed the screen puts every one of those tags in a list on the HMI list selector. Scratch question two.

1) You find what button or object is calling up a display to see what parameter file it is using. There will probably be multiple ones, as it is a bit pointless to use a display exclusively for one parameter file.

The parameters allow for a single display to reference many different objects in the PLC, rather than having a separate display for each.

2) The tags in the "States" are string tags, so they display different text based on what state is selected.

HAH! I looked all over the screens looking for where the parameter file was and I wasn't Google'n the right keywords to find my answer.

Its in the go to screen button. Thanks!

JeremyAdair said:

Its in the go to screen button. Thanks!

Click to expand...

Yes- typically in the "Go to screen" button. I used many of these for a tank farm project I did. There was multiple pumping skids. When you went from a pump skid page to the "tank status" page it would transfer the parameter file so it knew which valves interlocks should be highlighted. Although sometimes confusing to keep track of, it saved me from making multiple screens.