[00:00] Support for browsing and symbolic access among Siemens drivers has been highly anticipated, and the Siemens S7 symbolic driver delivers both. Just a few important notes as we get started: Like all drivers, the Siemens symbolic driver still requires the OPC UA module to be installed. It's also important to know that it has a limit of 250 device connections and the symbolic features only apply to the S7-1200 and 1500 devices. In addition, this driver is built for use with Windows X64, Linux X64, Linux ARM32, and Linux ARM64. Last, if you're curious about upgrading from the old-school legacy driver to this new version, we'll cover that in a separate video. You can find the link to it below. The new symbolic driver offers some significant perks over the legacy system. It lets other applications talk to your PLC tags using their symbolic names, i.e. tag names, instead of their absolute memory addresses.

[01:05] That means your code is easier to read, data access is smoother, and performance gets a big boost. It also lets y'all get at data inside optimized blocks and it retrieves symbols online. In this lesson, we're gonna walk through setting up a new device connection and then use the browsing feature and the designer to poke around the blocks and tags associated with the Siemens S7 1200 device. Good news, the same steps work for the S7 1500 too. For this example, we'll grab the symbols we need online from the PLC. Let's start by going to the Connections tab in the gateway. Here, under Devices, we can choose Connections. I'll click on the button to add a new connection, and we can pick the Siemens Driver option. We'll use an S7 1200 device for this demo, but if you'd like more information on other types of supported devices, Siemens driver syntax, or S7 data types, please check out the link section below this video. In the General Settings, I'll name our device connection SiemensS7_1200Symbolic, just to be extra descriptive.

[02:10] Next, under Connectivity, I'll punch in my device's IP address. The port is set to 102 by default, so I'll leave that in place. I'm also happy with the default timeout, so we can move on down to the device settings. For the device type, we can pick S7 1200 from the dropdown. Then the address type needs to be set to symbolic to allow for browsing. If we left it as absolute, then we'd still only be using the capabilities of the legacy driver and miss out on the benefits the symbolic driver has to offer. The rack and slot numbers just tell us the position of a Siemens S7 PLC CPU, so I'll stick with the default settings for this example. In the Advanced Settings, we've got options to optimize writes, force a secure connection, and choose what kind of password setup we want, if any. I'll leave those first two settings on false, select none for the password, and then hit our Create Device Connection button.

[03:06] If you need more info to help you decide what options work best for your own setup, please check out the User Manual pages and IU video links below. Now that our device connection is in place, let's head over to the Designer. If we go to the Tag Browser, we can hit the plus sign and choose Browse Devices to open the Connected Devices window. Under OPC browser, I'll expand Ignition OPC UA server, open devices, choose our S7 1200 device, and expand the PLC folder. This helps us drill all the way down to our blocks and tags. Our data blocks live primarily inside the blocks folder. If I expand that folder, I can dig into what's available and stage some sample tags for import. I'll just grab a couple here and there. Each one will then pop up in the tag browser and we can see the tag values come through like we expected them to.

[04:04] If we head back to browse devices again, we can check out another location to grab data from using symbolic access. Since the tags folder actually has a table folder that contains its own data block inside the PLC itself, we could go through a similar import process for the tags in the tags folder, too. The symbolic addressing using tag names and straightforward path to our optimized blocks give us easy access to the functionality and data we need from our Siemens device in the tag browser. Beyond these new features, the Siemens S7 symbolic driver also plays nice with multi-dimensional arrays inside your tags. The data comes back as a JSON object with different keys and values, which Ignition understands as a document type because of its complex structure. For example, this tag has a document datatype and holds a two-dimensional array. If I open this other tag, you can see from its OPC Item Path that it's reaching into that parent two-dimensional array we just looked at and plucking out a single value to display in the tag browser.

[05:09] By supporting symbolic access, browsing on S7 1200 and S7 1500 devices, optimized blocks, and even multi-dimensional arrays, this driver offers improved code readability, enhanced data access, and a real performance boost.