C-more Micro HMI Import and Export TAGs for PLC from AutomationDirect

Entering TAGs one at a time via the TAG Name Database isn’t too bad, but if you have 100’s it can get tedious. Especially if you simply want to borrow a bunch of TAGs from another project – Importing and Exporting can be a real time saver. In this example, we can see in our TAG Database that we have three oven TAGs, a Pressure, Temperature and a Screen Number TAG. Looks like the OVEN TAGs are on PLC2 … pressure and temperature are on PLC1 – and the Screen number is an internal TAG to the C-More Micro panel. We would really like to have 3 Temperatures off of PLC 2 to monitor these three ovens. It would be easy to add these couple TAGS the Tag Database, but for the purposes of this example pretend were adding hundreds of TAGs … To do that, we just export the current TAG Database – we can save it to any folder we want – give it any name we want – and you can store it as an Excel or CSV file. We’ll use a CSV format here. Then you just select what you want to export. Do you want to export everything? Just the TAGs from one PLC? Do you want to include internal TAGs and unused TAGs? We’ll select everything here, but we don’t need internal tags or unused tags. You can also create a sample template it will basically put out a header file and format the spreadsheet for you and give you a blank sheet that you can start adding TAGs to if you want to. OK, Lets go ahead and export these values … we’ll export those to our root drive .. Hit Export and we’re done. Now we just bring that up in our favorite spreadsheet program, you can see here is a list of all of the TAGs we exported … and it’s a fairly simple matter to grab maybe the temperature TAG, make several copies of it, change the name and maybe change the address … so as you can see it would be very easy for me to create large quantities of TAGs in the spreadsheet. I just save the spreadsheet … then go back to my project Then go to: File >> Import >> TAG Database. Go find that file – it’s warning us that this Oven 1 TAG already existed so we couldn’t add it, that’s fine. It’s just telling you any discrepancies that may come up – these are all fine because we told it not to over wright the existing TAGs. So we’re good to go. Now if we go back to our TAG Name Database you can see that the new temperature TAGs have been imported, and we are ready to go. So that was a lot of work for three TAGs, but again, if you have a large project or you have existing TAGs from another project importing and exporting TAGs is a great way to get them into your new project quickly. That’s all there is for this video – be sure to check out the other videos in this series. And as always, please send us any topics you would like to see covered – or - any other comments for that matter – we appreciate the feedback!