Creating Tags

Now that you have an idea of how tags work, you may be wondering how a tag is built. Building tags is made easy by VTS. The built-in Tag Browser is a management tool for the creation, modification, and deletion of tags. It also enables you to add graphic representations of tags to your operator interfaces by presenting you with the drawing options available to a tag on the basis of its tag type.

The Tag Browser enables you to choose the type of tag you wish to create (e.g. an analog input tag), and then opens a tag properties folder into which you enter attributes such as the tag's name, a description of its role in the system, the I/O device driver with which it should communicate, and so forth. An example of a tag properties folder is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5

As you can see from the above tag properties folder, it is a tabbed dialog. Each tab presents a different set of properties for the tag.

Each tab is labeled according to the type of properties that can be found on it. For example, the ID tab displayed in the tag properties folder above displays properties that identify the tag. The I/O tab contains the properties related to connecting this tag with the I/O device driver that it will use to communicate with the equipment in the outside world.

Once the properties have been entered into the tag properties folder, the tag is completely functional and immediately begins to read data from the system. You will have the opportunity to work with the Tag Browser and with tag properties folders throughout the tutorial.

The next step in developing the tag is to draw it on the screen using one of its available drawing methods, thus enabling you (and your operators) to view this data as it is occurring in real-time.