Confused about using Digital signals

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Using dying NXG...

My first experience with digital signals. I am collecting eight different signals at 1,000 samples per second. I mistakenly thought it was just like analog signals but it is not. These are all 0V or 24V from a PLC. I AM getting a digital result from System Designer so I know I am getting data correctly.

First:

I can't seem to use Index DWDT Index Channel by Name when using a channel name. My channel names are defined in my channel definitions.

Example:

Code. The example in red is not getting the data at all. All the rest get data.

Second:

How do I access a individual reading in the table? Apparently digital waveform uses a table rather than an array for the data structure. I can't seem to figure out how to extract the reading at the third index of the table. Seems like it should be an array.

Last:

What I need to do is take the digital signals 5 - 8 and convert them to a numeric value for all 100 readings at a time. I see there is a function to convert an array of binary to decimal. This feels like I am taking a lot of steps to do something that would be very common in LabVIEW/NXG though. Is there a much simpler way?