Important notes

General

• In the Attribute Editor, define a title for the panels that are displayed in each language.

• If necessary, translate the panels that you have created in one language into other languages by means of the translator or the WCCOAtoolParse and WCCOAToolTrans tools.

• As of the version 3.18 ISO projects cannot be created anymore. Create UTF-8 projects instead.

• Languages used in WinCC OA must be supported by the operating system to be used correctly. Especially on Linux systems it must be ensured that the correct languages are installed.

• Because of different character sets some problems may occur when switching between several ISO encodings.

  For example: ISO88592 text elements may not be displayed completely right when switching to the ISO88591 encoding (e.g. Ő changes to Õ).

• Please make sure that fonts containing the desired characters (glyphs) are installed.

• Certain special characters are not available in all languages when using ISO standard encoding. For example, the "to the power of 2" character (as used in m²) is not available in the language Polish (pl_PL.iso88592). Therefor usage of UTF-8 encoding is highly recommended when creating new projects. For more information please refer to list with all available languages.

CTRL scripts:

• Do not use fixed strings for texts that are displayed. Please use the function string getCatStr() instead .

• Use the function formatTime (e.g. formatTime("%c")) to display date and time. This function automatically generates date and time in the local format. Please also use this format for trend displays (time axis) and clock widget .

• Do NOT use the implicit conversion time -> string when the date and time are shown to the user, since this does not generate a string in the local time format but always the fixed format of YYYY.MM.DD HH:MM:SS:mmm.

• We recommend that you use spin buttons (e.g. properties of the alert table) when asking the user to input the time and/or date. Because parsing of a string containing a time stamp string is not possible without knowing what format the user is using. ( As an example, consider “05/06/07”, which according to American notation is May 6^th 2007 while according to European notation it refers to June 5^th 2007 and even June 7^th 2005 according to Chinese notation.)

Driver

The following restrictions apply to all drivers and should be taken into account to ensure that a connection can be established successfully:

• Devices, connection names etc. must be written using characters from 7-bit-ASCII characters

• Data point names may only contain the following characters: 0-9, A-Z, a -z and the special character "_" (underline). Please refer to create a data point.

• All other or similar descriptions can use all coding languages (e.g. Chinese, Korean, Russian)

• Entries in the configuration file can only use characters from the 7-bit-ASCII character set as shown in the table below:

ASCII character table, hexadecimal numbers

The first 32 ASCII character codes (from 0x00 to 0x1F) are reserved for control characters.

Using ISO catalogues in UTF-8 projects

If you want to use ISO coded catalogues in a new UTF-8 project, proceed as follows:

1. Copy the folders that contain the catalogues of the ISO project (e.g. <project directory ISO>\msg\de_AT.iso88591) to the project directory (<project directory>\msg).

2. Ensure that the msg-utf8 directories exist in the utf8 project and the catalog files that should be converted do not exist in the utf8 directories.

3. Open an iso88591 catalog in the GEDI and save the catalog.

4. The catalog is converted into the utf8 format and is saved in the utf8 directory.

5. Delete the iso88591 directory afterwards.

Thus, the catalogues will be saved automatically in the specified project language in the appropriate folders (e.g. <project directory UTF8\msg\de_AT.utf8).