LESSON

Keeping Tags Organized

Description

It is important to give Tags a meaningful structure (you can also rename the Tags independent of their Item Path) and arrange them in hierarchical tag folders so that they are easy to understand and identify for all developers.

Video recorded using: Ignition 7.7

Transcript

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[00:00] Naming and organization of tags is critical in an application. You know, if you just put all `of your tags into one root folder with poor names, it is very difficult for the next person to be able to identify what the tags are supposed to be doing and where they are used in Ignition. So as you're developing your tag database, it's important to actually use folders, and to name things appropriately. So any point, if I'm, you know, bringing some tags into Ignition, so I go into some of my devices, let's say I go down to my Control Logics, and here I have, you know, a few different tanks. I'd probably want to come over here, right click, and create a folder called Tanks, and then I can drag in all of my Tanks into that folder, and now that's a really nice structure that I can work with. Furthermore, if we have a tag from the PLC that isn't named very well, like typically tags from Micrologix or Slick, they're like, you know, names N7:0 or F8:1, whatever those names are, when I drag that into Ignition of course, it's going to use that exact same name. But that name may not mean much to the next person, so you may know what N7 corresponds to, but here we should rename this, right click, rename to, let's say, you know, Temperature. And now everybody's going to know that this is a temperature tag. So we can easily move tags into folders, and if I wanted to create a folder now for all of my temperatures, I can just create the folder, take the tag, drag it into the folder, and now I've got a hierarchy that I can work with. And this hierarchy's especially important when we create certain screens and use indirection, because the only difference between certain folders might be just the name of the folder. We'll talk a lot more about that in another lesson. Another thing that's really important about naming and organization of tags is to make sure you do that early on, because if you use a tag onto a screen, like for example, if I use this tagged LED display, I use this tag maybe in other places as well. If I was to rename this tag, or move it to another folder, it's going to break the reference to it onscreen. So if I change this now, I want it to be just simply Temp, you're going to notice that my screen over here, is showing Tag Not Found on the LED display. So, we allow you to rename a tag, but when you do that you got to be careful because certain things could break depending on where you're using it in the product. So keeping organized and defining your tag structure early on is critical.

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