Global tab

The Global tab of the Project Explorer contains the project tags database, as well as other features that apply to the entire project such as the security system, VBScript procedures, and UI translation.

The folders on the Global tab are described in the following sections:

Project Tags folder

The project tags database contains all of the data tags that you create during project development, such as screen tags (for example, button1_state) or tags that read from / write to connected devices.

Classes

Classes are compound tags that you can create to associate a set of values, rather than a single value, with an object. For example, where you may normally create separate tags for a tank's pressure, its temperature, and its fill level, you can instead create a "tank" class that includes all three.

Shared database

The shared database contains tags that were created in another program and then imported into or integrated with your project.

System Tags

System tags are predefined values such as the date, the time, the name of the current user, and so on. You can use these values to develop supervisory functions and maintenance routines.

All system tags are read-only, which means you cannot add, edit, or remove these tags from the database.

Security

If you choose to enable it, you can use the project security system to control who may log on to your project and what they may do during runtime.

Procedures

• VBScript Global Procedures are VBScript functions and subroutines that can be called by other VBScript scripts in your project.

• Python Global Procedures are Python functions, classes, and variables that can be called by other Python scripts in your project.

Event Logger

The event logger saves runtime messages and task activity to an external database.

Translation

You can use the translation table to develop a multilingual user interface (MUI) for your project.