Hi jlmcguire3,
The purpose of the AOI is so that you can set any values or parameters inside of the AOI and not have to manually update every instance. If you edit the AOI, the changes are applied to everywhere the AOI is used if you have a well configured UDT.
That's not necessarily true.
If you have some logic which e.g. says MOV 1 to Some_Tag, and you update it to be MOV 2 to Some_Tag, all instances of the AOI will update. That is, if you change the
logic, all instances of the AOI will inherit that logic automatically.
However, let's say you have an input parameter called MyParam, and it's default value is 1. You can make the default value 1 by specifying it in the AOI definition parameters table, or by setting a value of 1 in that tag anywhere it exists in your AOI definition logic.
Now, you create 10 instances of that AOI. In each AOI, the value of MyParam will be 1, unless you act to change it.
Next, you go to your AOI definition parameter table and change the default value of MyParam from 1 to 2, and click OK.
All of the existing instances of that AOI will retain their original value, that is, MyParam in all existing instances will remain at 1 (or whatever other value they may have since been manipulated to in each instance). Any
new instances you create from this point on will use the updated default value, but the ones that already existed will not change.
However, as OP has suggested, it would be handy to be able to update those values in all the existing AOI's without manually going through them one at a time - and there's a function to allow exactly that. At the bottom of your AOI definition parameter table, there is a check box labelled "Copy all default values of parameters and local tags whose values were modified to all tags of this instruction type", which does, well, exactly what the description suggests. If you update a default value, check that box and then hit OK, all existing instances of the AOI will be updated to use whatever default parameter you just added or specified or changed.
Even if you have previously changed them from their original default.
