Messages

1

Open Discussion / Re: Source for MfgControl.AdvancedHMI.Drivers?

« on: September 28, 2018, 07:33:01 PM »

Thanks for the quick response...I found that page, but don't see class docs for the driver. Where's the data on, for example, BeginReadMultiple?

2

Open Discussion / Source for MfgControl.AdvancedHMI.Drivers?

« on: September 28, 2018, 12:48:08 PM »

Building a basic application with drag-and-drop controls and property edits went pretty smoothly, but to get real work done I wanted to be able to do that programmatically.   After some digging into the control code, I eventually found that it was calling ethernetIPforCLXCom.Write().  A bit of common sense (with the help of Intellisense) gave me .Read(), and that was enough to get some basic boolean and integer tags moving...but soon I wanted to look at strings and arrays and UDTs and so on. 

I found the source file AdvancedHMIDrivers/AllenBradley/EthernetIPforCLXCom.vb but was briefly confused to find that this is not the file that contains the source for these methods.  Instead, read and write are in MfgControl.AdvancedHMI.Drivers.EthernetIPforCLX....which is a DLL.  Using Visual Studio's "Go To Definition" takes me to a view of this file generated from metadata (attached), with a lot of juicy methods to call:

Code: [Select]

        public static int GetByteCount(int AbreviatedType);
        public int BeginGetAttributesAll(int classID, int instanceID);
        public int BeginGetAttributeSingle(int classID, int instanceID, int attribute);
        public override int BeginRead(string startAddress, int numberOfElements);
        public int BeginRead(CLXAddressRead address, int numberOfElements);
        public int BeginReadMultiple(Collection<CLXAddressRead> addresses);
        public int BeginReadMultiple(string[] addresses);
        ...

...but, being generated from metadata, this has no method bodies, no comments, and no clues as to how to use these other than the method and parameter names plus whatever trial-and-error can produce.

Am I missing something? Where's the source for this file?  I understand how time-consuming it can be to generate and maintain documentation, but if I had to read the source I'd have a better chance of getting this to work than if I'm just guessing.

Thanks in advance...