Which products are affected?
ESP-DDS2-x (Global Drive PLC Developer Studio Version 2.0)
ESP-GDC2 (Global Drive Control irrespective of version)
What happens?
If with the software Global Drive Control (GDC) a PLC target system is sought (e.g. Servo PLC), the following information appears:
The project included in the PLC '<address>' cannot be identified. Do you want to try to load basic PDB?
However, the current device description (*.pdb) is located in the search path of GDC.
When does the problem occur?
Upon execution of the menu command
Project>Rebuild all DDS issues a new project ID and with that new ID a new device description (*.pdb) is created.
If the DDS project has not changed, the project will not be transferred when logging in. That is, if the menu command
Project>Rebuild all has been executed previously, the new project ID will not be transferred to the target system (e.g. Servo PLC). Consequently, the project ID in the target system differs from that in the device description.
If the target system is now sought by GDC, GDC cannot assign any project-specific device description to the target system because of the different IDs.
Possible diagnostics?
None.
Short-term measures/recommendations?
The GDC software makes it possible to open, for a target system, a device description whose project ID does not agree with that of the target system. The user must make sure that the device description matches the target system because otherwise this can lead to target system malfunctions.
Proceed as follows to ensure that the same project ID is in the project-specific device description and in the target system:
Before logging in, execute the menu command
Project>Clean all. As a result, the next time you log in the new project ID will be written to the device description and transferred to the target system. However, care must be taken to ensure that a parameter set file created with GDC (*.gdc) also contains the project ID. That is, in this case any existing parameter set file must also be updated.
This function restriction has been remedied in DDS Version 2.1.
Evaluation:
With the above-described recommendation GDC can have access to all the codes of the target system (e.g. of a Servo PLC). This function restriction makes it more difficult to handle the binary file, the device description and the parameter set file but it does not lead to any target system malfunction.
