Description

Learn how to use the Multi-Instance Wizard to rapidly create many UDT instances at once.

Transcript

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[00:00] In this lesson we'll talk about the UDT Multi-instance Wizard. The Multi-instance Wizard is a way to create multiple UDT instances very quickly. To access the wizard you need to right-click wherever you wanted to create the instances. So, I'll right click at the root of my Tag Provider and go down to Multi-instance Wizard. Brings up this little window here. I'm going to re-size it just a little bit since some of the items are hidden. And it does walk you through how to create new instances. So, step one, we need to select a definition. I only have my motor definition. So, it's really the only option. You then need to specify a base tag name. Now, in an earlier lesson, I created a single instance of my motor definition and I called that Motor One. I'm going to try and match the same naming convention with these new instances. So, I'll type in Motor with the same casing and I'll use an underscore. Now, as the name of this field implies, this is the base name for each instance. So, when we create an instance we're going to start its name off with this and then we are going to append a number at the end. That number we append, is based off of the tag name pattern up here. Now, I have eight motors in total, so, I could actually type two dash eight. You'll notice down below that this little information area does state that you can use ranges and such. Although, instead of specifying the pattern up here, I'll just say start at motor two and we'll define a pattern on the perimeters. So, we can see under this perimeters table here, it does have this motor number perimeter and this table is being pre-populated by whatever perimeters exist under the definition I have selected. So, if I had more perimeters under motor, you would see them on the table down below. So, here's where we can specify our pattern. So, I will double click on the pattern cell here, and type two dash eight and when I hit enter you're going to notice that the size fields change. So, you can see they are both set to seven now. If we hit the preview button in the lower left hand corner, it actually shows you what it is trying to do. It's going to create these instances with these names. And then for each instance, it gets a unique value for the motor number perimeter. Now, if we head back here, just to talk about some of the other options you have available for you with these patterns. You'll notice that list is comma separated. So, if I wanted to explicitly set each value, I could just add a comma and then put something else down, such as 100, then put another comma down. And we can also use repeating values. So, it's the value and then how many instances you want. So, I could have a value of 200 on five instances. So, when I hit enter again, it's going to create 13 this time. If we go back to preview, it shows the first seven does one instance with a perimeter value of 100 and then 5 instances with a perimeter value of 200. And of course the whole time it's only incrementing the name by one. Now, we'll head back here and I'm going to clean up that pattern a little bit. I don't actually need the last two items in that little list there. We'll hit enter so that we are back to seven. And I'll create these instances. So, I'll hit okay here. You can see that it created these new instances. And if I start examining them, we're getting new values. And, of course, if I look at the actual perimeters, you can see that they're getting their values based off of the perimeters and range of perimeters I defined within the wizard. So, that was the wizard. It's a very quick way to create multiple UDT instances very quickly.

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