Can an NS screen display a message based on a value in a data area?

[AngryRobot]

I am running a very large step based program on an NJ plc.  I have several status and alarm messages that I need to display on the screen during the auto cycle.  Right now I have set up unions in the PLC for the faults... but this is a very large program with a lot of possible faults.  I'm up to 9 16-bit array unions already.  It is just getting really cumbersome.

 

I would like to just write an INT to a data area for each fault and status message.  That way I can assign each step a 5 values to be used for faults and messages (ie: step one can use numbers 1-5, step 2 can use 6-10, etc) .  Then I want to have the NS display a message from the string table based on the value in the data area.  Is this possible?

[Michael Walsh]

You can use the label function and create a .txt file with all of your strings that you want to display inside of the label.  Then you set an address, the integer value of which points to a line in the .txt file.  Look on the bottom of the General Tab for a label object (Indirect Reference of a String).

[AngryRobot]

Thank you very much!

 I guess this doesn't capture the faults in the alarm history like using the event registration does though.  I didn't think about that until now.  This customer does like having the alarm history recorded.  Dang it.... thank you anyway!  You really know your Omron.

[Michael Walsh]

There are probably ways that you could look at this in a macro in the NS as well, so that when the value is a certain number, set on a particular bit that is registered as an event trigger.  But this probably would be more work than the way that you are doing it now.