A conveyor system with 120 motors does not deserve 120 hand-configured drive calls. TIA Openness — Portal’s public .NET API — lets a program do the typing.
What Openness can drive
Practically everything the engineer clicks: create projects, insert devices, set network parameters, generate tag tables, instantiate blocks from libraries, compile, even export/import block sources as XML. The classic wins:
- Instance generation from an equipment list. Excel row → motor UDT instance + drive call + HMI faceplate tag. The 120-motor project becomes a data-entry task with zero copy-paste drift.
- Standards enforcement. A checker script walks the project nightly: naming rules, forbidden instructions, missing comments — the code review that never gets skipped.
- Bulk surgery. Renaming a signal across 300 blocks, or migrating a fleet’s library version, stops being a week of RSI.
Where to stop
Generation shines for repetitive structure, not for the 20 % of a machine that is genuinely unique — write that by hand and keep the generator simple. And keep generated blocks visibly marked: the maintenance engineer must know which blocks regeneration will overwrite.
FAQ
What do I need to start? Portal with the Openness option (included, must be enabled), Visual Studio or even PowerShell, and the Siemens Openness documentation. First useful script within a day is realistic for a developer.
Version dependency? The API is versioned with Portal — pin your scripts per Portal version and budget a small update pass per version jump.
Zone Otomasyon uses code generation on I/O-heavy projects — quotes get sharper when the boring part is automated. Machine builders, talk to us.