Synchronization and Local Targets

Vinnie

First some quick background and then one Q at the end. Our company has only been working with robots for about a year now. When we first started the guy they had doing all the programming never had much practical programming experience. So when I came in I changed everything going from one or two very large routines to breaking everything down into smaller more manageable routines and more modules. We were also running into problems with the names of our robtargets so I made as many as possible local to the routine they were a part of. This made things easy to follow naming problems disapeared... all was good. Now were starting to get into using RobotStudio. I bring up the virtual controller restore system from a backup we have of our robot. Then I try and synchronize to station and none of my targets show up. I figured out if I make some of my robtargets global again then they are loaded when I synchronize. I cant make all my targets global because I will have naming conflicts and it would reverse all the work i've done. So is there a workaround or some way of bringing in my local targets?

svenhelge

RobotStudio doesn't support local targets unfortunately, all targets are treated as globally in RS. The issue has been discussed but it would have too much of a negative impact on the gui of RS to change this limitation. 

Actually, targets can be declared locally in two ways: either by declaring them as LOCAL CONST in the MODULE header or by declaring them as CONST in a PROC. If you declare your targets in the procedure - they won't be synchronized at all. If you declare the targets in the module header they will be synchronized but two locally declared targets with the same name will not be distinguished between in RS.

I would recommend you to copy/paste all your declarations to the module headers and set them to LOCAL CONST - then synchronize ONE path at the time into RS and use the Rename targets functionality in RS for each path synchronized - to prevent duplicated targetnames in RS.

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Peter Fransson, ABB Automation Tech.