Editing genies through DBF Files

[XavierVilabril]

Hello,

I am in need of performing specific changes on a project with hundreds of thousands of tags and several hundred pages. I managed to mass-edit variables using an excel macro paired with the ProjectDBFTool. However,

I am facing issues regarding genie changes. I need to change genies to contemplate the changes I performed on the variables and change some genie types. I can find several DBF's pertaining to page layouts and such.

However, I cannot find the DBF page where genie instantiations are held. The closest thing i can find are CTG and CTF files, are these the only files holding this type of information? Is there no way to change file data to mass-update genies?

Thank you.

[olivier_vallee · Accepted solution]

Hi @XavierVilabril 

The only way to mass-edit pages or their content is via the Graphics Builder Automation interface. See online help here for more details:

https://docs.aveva.com/bundle/plant-scada/page/1152714.html

Now, the CTG file is where all graphics object instance and page are stored. The CTM is the Genie Library and the CTL is the Page Template library. These are each proprietary files. The CTF is just a bitmap used for fast runtime display functionality.

It is only possible to edit the graphics files via the Graphics Builder application or the GB Automation interface. 

The Page DBF files (pg****.dbf) are basically output files by the graphics editor from the source data, contained in the CTG files. These DBF files are only used by the compiler to then create RDB files (used by runtime). Since the compiler was not designed to read the CTG file directly, it goes through this intermediate DBF file. This means that you can't edit the DBF files to make any changes (that are long lasting). Since the source of truth is the CTG which will overwrite any changes made to the DBF.

Hope this information helps you.

Kind regards

Olivier

[XavierVilabril]

Thank you Olivier, I will look into the automation interface!