Setup guide

OSx Migration Cookbook August 30, 2006
15 – History
Trend data
Alarm and
process messages
Report outputs
Migrating OSx
history data
Both OSx and PCS 7 can capture and store actual tag values for
future reference. This is called trend data. In OSx trending is
configured via the Historical Trend Configurator, while in PCS 7
it is configured via Tag Logging in WinCC Explorer. Both have
similar functionality.
OSx captures alarm and process messages in a single file called the
Daily Log File. PCS 7 captures these in the Alarm Log. Unlike
OSx you must configure alarm logging to capture the messages.
OSx does this for all messages by default.
OSx also considers report outputs as history and captures all
outputs as part of its archives. PCS 7 does not have the capability to
save report outputs to files. Reports are designed to be printed.
However, there is third-party software that can install a “printer”
whose output goes to a file.
There is no mechanism included in PCS 7 that allows one to
migrate OSx history to PCS 7. However, there are some things you
can do manually to get this data available on PCS 7 stations.
Daily log files and Classic report outputs are text files that can be
copied to PCS 7 stations and be viewed using non-PCS 7 software
such as Notepad. Some Xess reports can produce output in Excel
or ASCII format. These could then be viewed with Microsoft Excel
or Notepad or imported into third-party graphing packages on a
PCS 7 station.
There is no way to convert OSx trend data so that it is directly
viewable in PCS 7. However, OSx has a utility, called htp, which
can convert OSx trend data to columnar text files. These files could
then be processed using OSx Unix/Linux tools or Microsoft
Windows tools into a format that would be acceptable as csv input
to Microsoft Excel or as input to some other software. Bear in
mind that this is a tedious process for large amounts of trend data as
you need to manually specify each trended point (tag:attribute and
perhaps bit). Additionally you would have to load old trend data
from archives onto an OSx station to do this. An alternative is to
keep an OSx station to view the old data.
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