A Question on Uploading from Siemens S7-300

[sanger]

I'm a bit of a Siemens newbie so this should be an easy question for some of you.

I have an oldish copy of an S7 Project that I need to refresh with the current code in the field. There does not seem to be any option for doing a complete Upload of a processor to an existing project so the best thing I could think of was to go online, select all of the blocks and do a Right-Click, PLC -> Upload to PG. After doing this I now get the error "The symbol information for the block is invalid" when I open any block.

I know I can create a new Project and then do a PLC -> Upload Station to PG but how do I incorporate the Symbol Information from the old project.

In short what is the best procedure for doing a complete upload of an S7 CPU, including all CPU settings etc, while retaining the Symbol information/documentation from the offline file.

We are using Step 7 Pro v5.4

Thanks

 

[Jeff23spl]

it doesn't work this way like AB having text on 1 file and code on another 1 that can be merged.

you need to have the original program with symbol and comments or having the file saved on the SD card but this isn't a popular practisse around here unfortunately...

The last option is to make an upload and copy/paste symbols and comment from your previous version to the uploaded one but it may be tricky

 

[JesperMP]

Do an Online-Offline Block compare.
If the differences are not so many, you can update the offline project to match the online project, and in that way keep comments and symbols.

 

[Paul B]

As they have stated, there is not an easy way. Step7 really cares about date-time stamps and if the online date-time stamp does not match the offline, you will get the dreaded "symbol information of the block is invalid".

If it is an FC you can upload, save, then download and the message will not re-appear.

For a DB if you have the original block with symbols here is what I would do:
1. Make a backup of your project.
2. Right click the DB you want to work with, let's say it is DB21. Right-click and copy/paste, rename it DB1021. Now you have a backup of it.
3. Drag online to offline (to upload from PLC). You will of course overwrite DB21 with the online version.
4. Now open the offline DB21. If you get "symbol information of the block is invalid" then open your DB1021 side-by-side.

At this point you have two choices:
1. Switch to Data view and manually input the online data values from the DB21 into the DB1021. Then delete DB21, rename DB1021 to DB21 and download back to PLC.
2. Stay in Declaration view and manually input the symbols from DB1021 to DB21. Save and download back to PLC.

Only you can decide. Whatever you do you must download it back to the PLC so the date-time stamp of the offline matches the online version.

I've had to follow other programmers that weren't careful about putting the latest copy of the program on the server. I have always been able to recover using these methods.