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:
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.
|