MScomm on Wincc
Hi,
No-one seems to have taken me on with this question, However I have found the answer to this and I suspect many other similar issues.
My basic issue was this I needed to access MScomm control on my HMI which in its self is simple you place the control down on one of your screens or access it from a script.( simple if your control is registered etc on your machine).
Using the control was simple too (if you know a little VB), the port was opened and I atteached my handheld barcode scanner and read the buffer, hey presto got the barcode from the script i wrote.
My problem is I want the barcode unit to work regardless to which screen i was on i.e. if my mscomm control was on screen 3 and i went to screen 7 my mscomm stopped working. I tried adding the control to the Template screen Nothing but errors happened.
After plowing through the manuals it seems that on some of the HMI units including my PC 677 19" HMI that if you go onto any of the screens and move your cursor to the top of the the screen (right to the top edge) you will be able to click, hold and drag the screen down a little revealing another screen behind it.
The best way i can describe this is it is like a Template but not. The screen is a single global screen that all other screens have constant access to. Hence you put you mscomm control into that dragged down global screen, all screens have access to it and the mscomm control works constantley when the control is initiated.
This global screen is called the "overview" screen and is accessed by this name.
The name of it makes sense now as i have a screen called overview however it always put a hyphen in the name "over-view" and would never allow me to call it "overview", now i know why.
The overview can be accessed by the scripts aswell just in the same way you would access any smart tagname of your object just call for overview instead. This will probaly solve a lot of other issues where you need to access controls in a global way.
Hope this helps.
