Copy and Paste Members of UDT's

Hi

I have found it frustrating that you cant copy a member of a UDT and paste it. It would make development quicker. You have to create a new one and populate everything from scratch

Aidan

That would, indeed, be a big help. It is a lot of repetitive work to add new members that are just slightly different from existing ones. It would be much easier to copy and paste, then modify instead of having to create everything again from scratch. This is especially true if you are adding a tag with alarming on it. If it has Lo, LoLo, Hi, and HiHi alarms, it is very time consuming.

+1 for this

You can use a UDT as a Parent Type and you can also add existing UDTs to a UDT.

I have a CommonUDT that is the parent of all my UDTs, it contains tags like Name, ShortName, Path, etc, this gives all my UDTs these tags and if in the future I determine that all my UDTs need another tag I just need to add it to my CommonUDT.

I also have a RuntimeMeterUDT that I add to any UDT that needs a counter and runtime meters.

Just some thoughts.

Agreed,

I am trying to build a recipe editor within Ignition and find it dificult to to copy a recipe step UDT into a master recipe UDT. Copying an UDTs such as an analog point containing engineering units, alarm levels, etc… ,recipe steps, tanks, pumps, part trcking data, etc… requires either coping individual values or building a handler to do it in the PLC.

I have found a funky way to initialize a UDT by deleteing it then creating a new one of the same name utilizing the IA Labs Scripting Module. I’m not sure how this is going to effect other prossecess looking at those tags asyncronusly (trending, OPC, background scripts).

Does anyone know if there is any plans to add capability to copy entire UDTs (UDTa = UDTb) as well as subsets (UDTa/Step15 = UDT_Step). Initializing a UDT could also be handy but could be worked around by copying a blank UDT into the one to be cleared. I see this functionality giving Ignition significant more power in data manipulation.

See my post “Clear / Reset / Initialize UDTs in Script” in the knowledge base for more info.

+++1 for this, copy, paste members, duplicate menbers of UDT’s
will help me every day…

+1

And would it be possible to use the multi-instance wizard here at all?

+1

+1

+10… This would be a big time saver. I believe OP was asking for functionality to allow copying and pasting UDT members within the UDT editor (not, as I believe RMAC brought up, copying one UDT instance’s values into another UDT instance’ values–as can be done in an Allen Bradley Logix PLC, for example–, though that would certainly be a handy feature in Ignition as well).

Regarding copy/pasting members while editing/creating a UDT, one of the following options would save a lot of development time, particularly for UDT members with a lot of duplicate settings:

1 - Have a multi-instance wizard for inserting members into a UDT (same as tag creation multi-instance wizard). This would be the best option by far.

2 - Next best, and far better than the current “create each member from scratch option” would be allow copying and pasting of a UDT member–just auto-increment the name to prevent conflicts. For example, if a UDT has a member OPC tag named “member” and you copy/paste it in the UDT editor 5 times, you would get “member1”, “member2”, “member3”, etc. Then you make whatever minor changes are required to each member instance, rather than creating each one from scratch.

Below is an example of where this would be helpful–the UDT contains 14 members that are all the same except for their names (0-13) and one parameter (also 0-13):

+1

+++