S7 - Unable to copy GRAPH7 FBs

[RMA]

As mentioned in another Thread, the wonderful new PC I've been given to work with has a habit of crashing at regular intervals. Now that I've got back into the habit of saving regularly, it hasn't been causing me too many problems.

However, this time it caught me in a GRAPH7 program that I was checking out because I wanted to use it as basis, slightly modified for a new program (an Abort as opposed to a Controlled Shutdown).

After killing the GRAPH7 Editor with the Task Manager, I then tried to copy the FB and got a message saying that "a Text Library with this name already exists" - message 299:172 of Insert Function Block, and the copy aborted. (No change after rebooting, etc.)

I managed to work around the problem by creating a new GRAPH7 FB and then using cut & paste to copy the program over, but I'm not too happy about having this sort of problem lurking around. It has the feel of one of those things which can come back and bite you some time later.

Has anybody any idea of how I can clean things up? I've found a bunch of files in the "meldeom" sub-directory of the project called "TEXTABLE.*", "TEXTLNK.*" and "TEXTOM.*" with timestamps which look about right for the crash time - can I try just deleting them (after doing a backup of course!)? I tried doing a reorganise (because quite a f ew of the files have .DBF and .DBT extensions), but that hasn't helped.

I'm beginning to think I might be better off waiting till I get the new project laptop with 1280 x 1024 resolution, which they've promised me for next week, but still, all suggestions welcome!

 

[RMA]

Just in case anybody's still thinking about how to tidy things up, I thought I'd solve the problem by going back to the previous day's backup (I do a full archive at least once a day, more often if anything major is being changed or added) and then copied over the couple of FCs that had changed in between time.

Since I hadn't actually changed anything in the GRAPH7 FBs at the time of the crash, that left everything clean, however, I found I still couldn't copy my GRAPH7 FBs. After a bit of playing around, I went back to a backup from last June when the FBs were created. One of the FBs was a bit over 4kB large and the other was just the empty shell with 38 Bytes. The empty FB I could copy, the larger one failed. Unfortunately, that FB went from empty to 4kB in between two backups, so I don't have a smaller version.

So I had a look at a very much smaller project where I had also used GRAPH7 (more as a training exercise, than because it was necessary) and it had a GRAPH7 FB 2,7kB large. This one I could copy OK.

So the question I now have is, is this a size problem, which seems relatively unlikely, given that 4kB is very much smaller than the 24kB+ of the biggest of my GRAPH7 FBs. Or could it be that something got screwed up while I was creating the 20 parallel paths by cut & pasting the first one?

Has anybody else using GRAPH7, particularly if they have a few parallel paths, created FBs which are 4kB or bigger and if so can you successfully copy them to create a new FB in Simatic Manager?

 

[RMA]

I've just noticed that at the bottom right of the symbol for my GRAPH7 FBs is a little yellow triangle with an exclamation mark inside it. These have been there for as long as I can remember so I never thought any more about it. Looking in the help files, I discovered that this means they are diagnostic capable (or something similar - "diagnosefähig"). The funny thing is that the new GRAPH7 FB I created does not have this symbol (yet?). This FB allows itself to be copied, so it looks as though the copy problem is related to the diagnostic function. Another point, PDIAG is present in the project, although I have no recollection of installing it. Does it get automatically installed with GRAPH7?

The second funny thing about the new FB is that it's larger than the original, 10064 Bytes vs. 7556, quite a substantial difference. I would have thought if anything, having been created in one fell swoop with cut & paste, it would have been smaller than the original, which has been mucked about with many times.

All very strange!

 

[stevo]

Hi RMA,
PDIAG is a optional extension package to step 7, If you are using S7 v5.2 and onwards then a PDIAG viewer is included.
If you are using PDIAG then the operands you tag with be highlighted in Yellow (As default)

Hope this helps

Steve

Is there a DB to accompany the FB you are trying to Copy?
Have you tried to import as Source file?

 

[stevo]

Hi RMA,
As usually im not the best at explaining, I thought a picture might help, is this what you are refering to.

 

[stevo]

How good is that (the multiple pictures i mean) not my dodgy paint skills he he

This place just keeps getting better and better!

 

[RMA]

The little triangles in the Simatic Manager picture are exactly what I've got, but I don't know why! I've never knowingly invoked PDIAG. Or could this happen if I use a Tag in ProTool that is used in the FB. But then why is it only the GRAPH7 FBs and not the STL or FBD ones?

Siemens voodoo again!