Data types and data conversion
The Beckhoff driver supports the Beckhoff PLC data types and their mapping to runtime data types as follows:
| Beckhoff data type | Runtime data type |
|---|---|
| SINT | INT1 |
| USINT, BYTE | UINT1 |
| INT | INT2 |
| UINT, WORD | UINT2 |
| DINT | INT4 |
| UDINT, DWORD | UINT4 |
| REAL | FLOAT4 |
| LREAL | FLOAT8 |
| BOOL | BOOL |
| STRING | STRING |
The Beckhoff driver supports Beckhoff PLC user defined datatypes and ARRAYS, for all of the above data types, up to three levels (x, y, z). The driver does not currently support TIME, TIME OF DAY, DATE, DATE AND TIME, POINTER, ENUM, and ALIAS data types.
The Beckhoff PLC data types are supported in the the runtime environment wherever a variable is accessed and the variable is associated with a Beckhoff PLC device. Some examples are:
- Workbench Variables window Read as and Write as functions
- Transport map data type parameters
- Trigger data type parameters
- Trigger action variable data type parameters.
The data representations in the Beckhoff PLC, the runtime and the Workbench are supported by the necessary data conversion functions (e.g. Real and Float4). Beckhoff tags can be organized as items in a group. The group / item relationship is maintained by driver.