Control.com - Nerds in Control

I would like to connect our Simatic panels with LAN-port to a central database.

WinCC flexible help file states: "Recipes are stored on the HMI device or on an external storage medium. If, for example, production data is stored on a server in a database, you can import the production data via a CSV file at runtime."

Anyone with experience in this field? Our product (recipe) database is a MS Access. Do I need to go via CSV? How do I automatically synchronize (update) the CSV with the database?

Access is a relational database whilst CSV is a flat file format of a snap-shot of data.

So if this is a once off process and all the data is conveniently in one table then in Access you can right-click on the table and export to a Text file, which you can delimit (with a comma) as a csv file.

Now if it is once off and the data is spread over some tables you could write a query in Access and right-click the query and export as done above.

If it is dynamic you might have to write some software to generate the file dynamically from Access on a trigger. This is easy to do using C#, VB, VB.net, C++. You would have to trigger the generation from the Panel.

I hope this helps you.

Thanks BryanJ,

That was useful. Any idea of how to make periodical export of a table or query? Access 2007 has the possibility to create Outlook task, but I don't want to use Outlook.

It would be quite easy to write a program that runs as a service on a PC that periodically runs a query on the database and creates/overrides an existing CSV file.

I would be quite happy to assist - provided it is on a windows OS. Let me know and I will give you some contact information.