Wonderware Intouch 9.5.100 Tag Replacement

[Grendizer]

Hey all,

Am trying to rename tags, thousands of them, without having to open the "Tag Dictionary" and modify them from there. Is there a way of doing this without doing it from "Tag Dictionary"?

The problem is that if I export the tags and rename them then import them back, all the tags in the screens I have will be broken.

Your help will be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Grendizer

 

[Webhead]

I wish there was but the only way to "rename" tags if they are already used on animation links or scripts is to do it manually tag by tag. Be thankful, you couldn't even do that in previous versions..... Sorry for the bad news.

 

[Paullys50]

Regardless you'll need to fix all tag reference in the application, unless you do it one by one by one through the screen/script to the tag editor. It will be a chore.

You'll have to do multiple steps.

1 - DB Dump to a csv file, redo all your tags there.
2 - DB Load
3 - Go to all screens select all - replace tags as required
4 - Scripts is a bit messier, I copy and paste to MS word and do a find/replace then copy paste back to the script editor
5 - Clean up all tags buried within scripts of symbols/cells
6 - Delete unused tags from the application to ensure all old tags are removed from the system.

Hopefully your tags are generic enough that you can update tags in large groups. "Jimmys_Tag_001" -> "Johnnys_Tag_001" Any tag prefixed with Jimmy is easily updated with the Johnny prefix. But if you have to do "Jims_Tag_For_Pump2" -> "Johns_PMP001"...good luck.

 

[Grendizer]

Thanks for the reply guys.

Unfortunately Paully's5.0, all the renaming will have to be in the way you said it "Jims_Tag_For_Pump2" -> "Johns_PMP001". The initial designer did a horrible job naming the tags, so I guess I will have to go screen by screen, script by script, and do the changes manually.

 

[OZEE]

Or just leave it alone... If it ain't broke, does it need fixing??? Unless you're really bored and are looking for something to do, I would argue that this exercise is not positively contributing to your company's bottom-line.

 

[Paullys50]

Or just leave it alone... If it ain't broke, does it need fixing??? Unless you're really bored and are looking for something to do, I would argue that this exercise is not positively contributing to your company's bottom-line.

I agree with OZEE. However, any updates to the application should institute a new tag standard moving forward. The mess certainly seems way to large to clean up at this point. What does it buy you?

 

[Grendizer]

Ok, here is what's going on. I have 9 different applications done by different designers that needs to be combined in 1 application. Many tags have similar names. Not only that, but the customer needs to know which tag belong to which application. Trust, I will do anything to avoid this issue guys.

 

[Webhead]

I would work on the applications separately and implement what Paully said in Post #3 above. If you leave all of the tagnames in the application and then add on an extension to each tagname in a database dump you could use a simple search and replace in most of the scripts.

Then when you get that done "Update Use Counts" and delete all of the old tags.

 

[Grendizer]

Hey Webhead,

It is not simply putting an extension, prefix, or suffix. It would be great if that was the case, but am also modifying the name. Oh well, I reached to a conclusion that I have to do it manually. I thought there was a tool or something that will do it automatically for me.

Thanks for the help man,

 

[Paullys50]

I think the DB Dump/DB Load can still save you a lot of time. Depending on how good you are with excel.

My approach:

Create a new IO list with the new tag name, and the IO it references. With the DB dump file, sort it so the PLC IO is organized to match your IO list you've created. From there copy and paste from your IO list to appropriate points in the db file. If you can line this up correctly you can save time here. OR use the VBLOOKUP function to use the IO name to x-ref the new tag.

However, that only works well on tags referencing IO. If you need to re-do all memory tags to, ick.

At least you minimize the tedious work to find/replace on your screens and scripts. Not pretty but anything helps.

 

[Grendizer]

Hey Paully,

Ok, my excel skills are pretty good. I will try doing that.

Btw, I found a stupid bug in Intouch. I wonder if you know about it. It is about tags. Lets say:

You move a screen from a different app to your current app, and you forgot to "Index" example "?d:tag" the tags so the program doesn't freak out. If you "Index" them, you are safe. If you don't, they get replaced by RANDOM tags from the current database. Do you know why this is happening?? This is one of the reasons why am afraid to do Dump&LOAD...

 

[Webhead]

Hey Paully,

Ok, my excel skills are pretty good. I will try doing that.

Btw, I found a stupid bug in Intouch. I wonder if you know about it. It is about tags. Lets say:

You move a screen from a different app to your current app, and you forgot to "Index" example "?d:tag" the tags so the program doesn't freak out. If you "Index" them, you are safe. If you don't, they get replaced by RANDOM tags from the current database. Do you know why this is happening?? This is one of the reasons why am afraid to do Dump&LOAD...

Are you importing the screen from within InTouch or just copying the screen from folder to folder? If it's the latter I have seen that cause the issues you are mentioning above and it has since version 3.1 and therefore I tried it once and it was a total failure.....

 

[Grendizer]

Hey Webhead,

I do not use the import function AT ALL. It has giving me soo many issues before, like not asking me if a file name with a specific number exist, breaks my "SmartObjects", the issue I mentioned above, and probably more that I haven't discovered yet. So what I do is I copy the files manually, then modify the ndx and nbk file to include the new screens. In both ways, tags gets replaced with totally Random once.. :S mann...

 

[Webhead]

Not to sound like tech support but, wait for it, say it with me. "I've never heard or seen that before". But really I have not heard of that problem. Maybe thee is a patch for that.

 

[Saffa]

I'm not sure if this is true for 9.5, but certainly in 10.5 if you rename a tag from within the tagname dictionary,all references within your project are updated too - I'm pretty sure I saw this behavior last week when I noticed a typo in 10 of my tags and corrected it.

The only thing to of course be aware of is that renaming tags will erase all historical logging data.