With the Lookup Text object the value of a TAG picks a text message from a table and
displays it.
Here we have an increment decrement button here which will allow us to increment and
decrement this tag easily.
As we increment the TAG, we get different messages AND each item used in a message gets
added to our simulator control window.
This example highlights several features: The main thing is the text can contain the
results of TAGs!
This is a discrete TAG that has been added to some text.
We can see that if we change the discrete tag, then the text message changes.
Or, you can display text with a numeric value.
This message is now reflecting the result of this numeric tag right here.
If we change that value, then it gets shown in the display.
You can also display text with a string – if we add a string here .. then it appears in
our message along with the text that we had already setup.
And, of course, you can always just display static text if you want to.
You can also specify tones to go along with the messages and you can specify how many
tones go with each message.
In this example we specified 10 tones to be sounded every time this message was displayed.
Finally you can specify the behavior if you run out of messages – in this this example
we chose to display a blank.
The lookup text is great for posting status messages that change over time, or error conditions
for example.
The beauty of this text lookup object is we can embed all kinds of TAG information.
Let’s see how to set this up: Double click on the lookup text object, or drag it onto
the screen.
Select the TAG that will serve as an index into our table – we’ll use this TEXT INDEX
TAG that we already have setup here.
Now we setup the text messages in this message database right here, which you can also setup
over here in the navigation windows function tab under message database or under the database
menu.
You can see we have already 5 different messages setup in this project.
You can specify the text size for each message so each message in the table can have a different
text size.
The Text color, The sound for each one – do you want beeps or not?
If you do want beeps, specify the number.
And then finally, the message you are going to display.
Let’s take a look at each message.
This first one displays a static text along with a discrete TAG.
You can pick any TAG you want by clicking on this little yellow button right here.
You pick the data format – is it discrete, numeric, or string – we’ll pick discrete.
Pick the TAG you want to use to control this.
We’ll use this “DISCRETE” TAG we setup – and you put in the text that you want
to use for the TAG – both the ON sate and the OFF state.
We just added another TAG to this message – we didn’t need to do that of course
… The next message on the list is a Decimal,
so we put in some ”Decimal” text and decimal number.
Let’s just look at that one instead of adding a new one.
You can see we chose numeric type, the NUMERIC TAG and all the usual formatting options you
would have with numbers.
The next message was a text message, with a string.
We simply chose a string type, and the TAG that indicates the location of the String
we want to display.
The next one was just static text.
And the next one we had a message – just a static text message – BUT this time we
enabled the sound.
We chose to turn the beeps on and we can either loop them forever or we can have a limited
number – let’s move that down to 5.
And that’s the end of our message database.
When you are creating messages, you can use tag you want, discrete, numeric value, and
strings – anything you want in your text message as many as you want BUT you are limited
to 128 characters max, including any embedded TAG data you display.
So .. using the lookup text object you can display a variety of messages and results
in a single box that canadapt to your application’s needs in real time.
And you can even control the sounds that go with each message!
And of course, if you use one of the color panels, you can get REALLY carried away with
the formatting of these messages!
A Side Note: If you want a graphical version of this where the plc picks images instead
of text, check out the video on “How To Use Multi-State bitmap objects.”
That’s it for this video – be sure to check out all of the other videos in this
series.
And as always, please send us any topics you would like to see covered – or - any other
comments for that matter – we appreciate the feedback!