Jesper,
you've hit the nail on the head. After I create the DB with STRING[14] and upload it, looking in the VAT
all Bytes are zero. Funny, I could swear I had a situation where the first Byte (alone) was set to 14 - however, I can't say for sure if that was after a fresh load - presumably not.
(I've just checked that out, if I modify the structure of the DB, i.e. change the STRING[14] to [16] and vice versa, the length Bytes do not get cleared. This only happens if I reload a project or do an "Urlöschen" - I've only worked with S7 in Germany, I don't know what the English command is called!)
As usual, FC30 bombs out with an error (BIE bit = 0), then, without stopping the system I wrote 14 into Bytes 0 & 1 - hey presto immediately everything works. Still leaves the open question of why this works on the CPU 314!
I then tried writing just Byte 0 and then just Byte 1 - perhaps not unexpectedly, it is the first Byte (0) that matters - Byte 1 is irrelevant.
Now this raises an interesting question, in my real program, I write these two "14"s at the start of the network, before I do anything else. Does this mean that memory transfers are not immediately carried out line for line, as it were? If not, I've probably got some pretty flakey programs floating around out there!
Sidenote: I would not be so eager to get from Protool to WIN CC Flexible. It is very different from Protool, very heavy, and still in version 1.0.0.
I don't really have a lot of choice, the customer is insisting on it. I chose ProTool because it was perfectly adequate for the job (although at one stage we were getting frighteningly near the 2K tags!). A couple of years ago (my doesn't time fly when you're enjoying yourself - middle of 2001, actually!) when I was just starting to work regularly with S7, I was involved with WinCC. I found it very counter-intuitive and what I particularly didn't like was that for many operations you had to mess about in two separate wizards to achieve the desired result. You can get used to anything, but comfortable it was not! Maybe it's improved since then.
Still the project runs to the end of 2005, for me till the end of March, so maybe I won't be in too much of a hurry to implement it after all. Do you know if there's been any feedback on it anywhere?
I'll do a search afterwards.
Hey, some nice soul has just pressed my Step7 V5.3 update into my hands - that should keep me busy for the rest of the day.