Input files

The command line WCCOAascii -in filename can be used to import ASCII files. The files must be saved in the respective project directory or you have to specify the complete file path as a parameter.

By importing ASCII files, you can:

  • Create data point types and data points.

  • Edit data point types and configurations.

The ASCII manager can be used for editing data point types. It is necessary to delete the old element and afterwards recreate the element with the new data type. Existing configs must be reimported / recreated. The element name can be changed by its element ID without deleting the element before and by this reassigning a new ID to this element. To do so, the element data type must remain the same.

ASCII Import creates two files WCCOAascii_info.log and WCCOAascii_log.log. All users who use WinCC OA and the WinCC OA ASCII Manager or other managers run under their user account, must have write access to the log directory and these two files.

The import does not work if the ASCII manager does not have write access to the log files.

  • Note that the maximum length of characters in a string value to be imported via the ASCII import isimited to 10 MB. The ASCII manager limit for import and export of large values (e.g. BLOBs) is equally 1MB.

  • The examples use Excel files that must be in text format (tab-delimited) to be imported. If you use a different editor, for example, Wordpad to create an ASCII file, the columns must also must tab-delimited.

  • The number of columns defined in the ASCII file to be imported must not exceed 200.

  • Note that it is not possible to change the ID of an element when its name and data type remain unchanged. In this case the following warning is issued in the log viewer:

    WCCOAascii_info:DpType (11): Element TestDP.alarm.testelement with id 29 gets new id 28 assigned - element id change will be ignored

    In addition the exit code of the ASCII manager is set to 76. Changes to the element ID in files to be imported must be avoided. Otherwise elements might unintentionally be overwritten by another element.

  • In case that the name of a data point element is changed, the following message is displayed in the log viewer:

    WCCOAascii_info:DpType (12): Element Test_Element3.alarm with ID 27 renamed, old name was Test_Element2.alarm

    Moreover, the exit code of the ASCII manager is set to 77.

    Note: When multiple ASCII files are imported with one ASCII command, the return error code of the ASCII manager is reset to zero for each file.
Import of ASCIIFiles (with several Languages)
  • Use the export option "Regular export" if an ASCII file that contains langStrings of several languages should be imported to another project. ASCII files of this format can be imported without problems independent of whether the languages or the number of languages in the new project correspond to the languages of the ASCII file.

  • When Data is imported to another project, an ASCII file must not have the same language structure as the project where you generated the ASCII output. Following fallback will be used:

    • use the text of the ASCII file with the exactly same language and country (e.g. de_de matches only de_de)

    • if not found, use the text of the same language (de_de matches de_at or de_ch)

    • if not found, use en_us

    • if not found, use de_at

  • When using the ASCII import with UTF8-encoding, consider that the necessary language packages must be installed on the system, otherwise the import will cause errors.

  • The ASCII manager interprets the imported file according to the encoding of the project. As a result, when importing files of an ISO project into an UTF-8 project, special characters may not be correctly displayed. In this case, those characters must be replaced manually (e.g. ä with ae, or ß with ss).

  • When importing ASCII files with texts by using ISO standard coding in a UTF-8 coded language, the same language-fallback-mechanism as when searching for a file is being used.