Communication driver

In

Type view

, the

CommDrivers

folder contains the available

Communication driver

objects.

In

FactoryTalk Optix Studio

, you can configure the communication with controllers at:

Design time

Establish a communication channel to import the controller tags.

Runtime

Use to keep the values and data types of the tags imported into

FactoryTalk Optix Studio

synchronized with the controller.

FactoryTalk Optix Studio

synchronizes tags at regular intervals based on the

Polling time for dynamic variables

property value of the

Presentation Engine

object.

TIP:

To optimize the read/write operations of tags,

FactoryTalk Optix Studio

primarily synchronizes the tags displayed or written through the active graphical objects (for example, a circular indicator in a window in the foreground).

To save bandwidth, controller tag values update at runtime only when

FactoryTalk Optix Applications

display the tags values.

To configure the communication between

FactoryTalk Optix Studio

and a controller, you must use these objects:

A
Communication driver
object that represents the communication protocol.
A
Communication station
object inside the related
Communication driver
, which represents the controller that you want to connect to.
TIP: For each protocol (
Communication driver
object), you can configure as many
Communication station
objects as there are physical controllers that use the same protocol in your application.

To use the controller tags in application logic, import the controller tags into

FactoryTalk Optix Studio

.

Depending on the communication protocol, the

Communication station

object can contain a

TagImporter

object to import tags in the online or offline mode.

Offline mode

Import a file with tags exported from the controller and imported into

FactoryTalk Optix Studio

.

Online mode

Establish a connection with the controller in the network and import tags from the controller from

FactoryTalk Optix Studio

.

For each tag imported from the controller,

FactoryTalk Optix Studio

creates a corresponding

Tag

project variable. For example, a

CODESYS Tag

variable represents a

Codesys PLC

tag. The values and data types of

Tag

variables remain synchronized with the values of the tags on the controller at runtime (in read mode and in write mode).

For advanced implementations, you can use the dedicated APIs through NetLogic (for example, to read/write tags at runtime). For more information, see C# APIs reference.

For each read/write operation of a single or multiple tags, the controller generates an operation code that describes the operation result.

Code	Description
Good	The read/write operation succeeded.
BadNoCommunication	The read/write failed because of a timeout (for example, a connection timeout). TIP: The timeout value is determined by the Timeout property of a Communication station object.
BadCommunicationError	The read/write operation failed because the controller returned an error.
BadConfigurationError	The read/write operation failed because of a tag configuration error (for example, an invalid address).