Application Builder
DanCo Systems, Inc. (DanCo) has developed an application builder program to automatically generate a FactoryLink Application from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The customer or engineer populates a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, provided by DanCo, with process control and tag information for the PLC communications driver (or other external device), the address of the individual points, the tag name, tag description, scaling values, dead band values, logging interval and requirements, alarm limits and the DanCo Application Builder generates a FactoryLink application that can be restored to a System running FactoryLink 7.5.
Once the new application is restored all tag information (description, scaling, dead banding, logging to Microsoft SQL Server and alarming is generated per the FactoryLink requirements the new application also provides real-time and historical trends for all tags entered into the system without the engineer or operator having to create trends for every point. The Application Builder creates an application that runs and provides real-time/ historical trends for every point. All that is left for the engineer/operator is to build any required graphics to view and display process data.
An engineer/operator with a populated spreadsheet can have a working application running in as little as 15 minutes.