Tech Note 411

Explanation of InTouch DBDump/DBLoad CSV Formatting

All Tech Notes and KBCD documents and software are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. See the Terms of Use for more information. Topic#: 002095 Created: April 2005

Introduction
This tech note describes characteristics of the .csv file that is used in the InTouch DBDump and DBLoad operations.

.csv Section Denotation and Modes

Each section of the .csv file is denoted with a : (colon). A few examples of the different section groupings would be Access Names, Tag Types, Trends, etc. Each of the rows that begin with : (for starting a new section) contain the names of the columns for the data that follows. The very first line in every .csv file will be: :mode=ask by default. This line toggles what mode a DBLoad will be performed in when processing the .csv file. While ask is the default, here are the other available modes: :mode=replace :mode=update :mode=ignore :mode=terminate :mode=test A detailed description of each of these modes can be found in the InTouch Users Guide.

Sections
The next section is :IOAccess. :IOAccess contains all access names to be defined inside of the application.

:AlarmGroup is the next section. :AlarmGroup contains the definition of all alarm groups in the application. Note that the ordering of these sections is critical. The alarm groups are a good example of this. InTouch must know all alarm groups before it starts importing tags because each tags definition includes what alarm group contains it. The same applies to the access names as each tag definition also contains a column for this as well. After the above two sections we finally reach the sections that define actual tags. A section for each tag type is included: :MemoryDisc :IODisc :MemoryInt :IOInt :MemoryReal :IOReal :MemoryMsg :IOMsg These sections are where most modification of a .csv file occurs. You must be careful to add new tags to the appropriate section with all column values defined or the DBLoad will fail. The remaining sections are: :GroupVar :HistoryTrend :TagID :IndirectDisc :IndirectAnalog :IndirectMsg While you can add data to these sections, it is recommended that this be done through InTouch itself rather than directly through the .csv. Note: If any errors are generated when doing a DBLoad of a modified .csv file, the Wonderware Logger is the first place you should look. In most cases the log entry will refer to an exact line/row number within the .csv where the problem was encountered along with a meaningful description.
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