Add or import many tags and/or mappings

[MichaelWestwood]

Hi All,

This might be best explained with an example:

I'm working with the Polynomial Scaling and Modbus modules. I have about 80 Modbus registers and a large proportion of the tags are floating point values which need to be integers in Modbus (multiply by 100 for 2 decimal places). Using the config editor I have to map the tags in the scaling module one at a time, selecting the input tag and output tag, then create a modbus register for each one the Modbus module, all of which is quite a laborious process.

Is there a better way?

Is it feasible to modify the config file outside the Configuration Editor? It would be useful to have a general tool which could import configs from a csv given the specific data structure required for a module. I haven't got deep enough into DCAF to know how to do that and DCAF is also my first real introduction to OOP, so the learning curve is steep. 

Thank You!

Mike

[Matt_Diesel]

I've done similar in the past both by generating the text of the PCFG file directly, and by loading an existing one and modifying using the LabVIEW classes. The latter is a better approach, and I found it much easier if you do start from an existing config and modify as creating the basic system, target and engine from scratch took quite a bit of figuring. The starting point is the CEF library in the Addons palette, in particular the "tree serialization" folder. That has the VIs to load a PCFG file from disk and get an array of modules. I then iterate over this and pick out specific IDs to modify using the DCAF classes that can be found in the vi.lib/NI/DCAF folder.

I'm a big subscriber to the unix philosophy of preferring to create a tool to do jobs like this, even if it takes a bit longer the first time. It saved me more time in the long run being able to generate from a spreadsheet as I was then able to generate slaves for use with a simulator when testing from the same spreadsheet, and was able to regenerate the modbus modules when I started using a custom one. In that case, there were about 800 modbus registers though, so it would have been a huge job to do by hand and scripting it saved a considerable amount of time.

[AGJ_CR]

The latest version of the Modbus Module (2.2.0.34) also supports importing/exporting its tags mappings from a CSV. I think this version is not yet in VIPM (we will release it soon) but you can also find the source in github: https://github.com/LabVIEW-DCAF/ModbusModules