We’ve picked up some pointers while helping clients migrate their existing WinCC projects. These are our best practices for navigating that transition, with practical tips and tricks to make the process as smooth as possible.

Why Upgrade from Comfort to Unified?

Comfort is Phasing Out: As WinCC Comfort is gradually being retired, moving to WinCC Unified will ensure that your projects remain supported and functional.

Scarcity of Technology and Hardware: Comfort hardware will become increasingly rare, making upgrading worthwhile to maintain project viability and avoid future headaches.

While this blog isn’t a full-blown tutorial on WinCC Unified, it focuses on providing useful tips, tricks, and common pitfalls you might encounter when converting your projects. Our primary focus is on version 18 of Unified, though many of these insights are relevant for earlier versions like V16 and V17, which come with their own set of challenges, and also future versions.

Using the Data2Unified Conversion Tool

The Data2Unified Conversion Tool from Siemens is a great starting point for converting your projects. This tool handles about 50%-90% of the conversion process for you, depending on what elements are present in your project.

How to Use the Tool:

1. Install the Data2Unified Conversion Tool.
2. In Portal, ensure you’ve added a Unified panel to your original Comfort project.
3. Right-click on your Comfort panel in the project, find the Data2Unified tool in the context menu, and select “Start.” The tool will begin processing your project.

4. Once your project loads, you’ll choose what you want to convert. Be sure to select the Unified panel as your target. Update the file name and path if needed, and then click “Save file.” For larger projects, this process might take a while, so it can be a good idea to run it overnight.

Limitations to Keep in Mind:

• Basic Navigation: The tool often produces basic navigation outputs that may need refinement.
• Faceplates: These aren’t converted automatically, so they’ll need manual attention.
• Displays and Lists: Alarm lists, trend displays, graphic displays, and similar elements require manual adjustment.
• VBA Scripts: Review and convert these scripts manually if necessary.
• Artifacts: Be on the lookout for issues like blinking elements or rotated vertical text.

Advantages of WinCC Unified

1. Improved Navigation:

• Screen Windows: WinCC Unified allows you to design screens larger than your display and embed them in smaller windows, which automatically adds scroll bars. This feature helps keep your project organized and user-friendly. In the below example, notice the scroll bar at the bottom of the zone section that lets you slide between different zones.

• Consistent Navigation: Set up a main screen with different windows for the header, content, and navigation. This setup creates a cohesive user experience and makes navigation more intuitive.

2. Simplified Popup Architecture:

• Faceplate Popups: You can use scripting to open faceplates as popups. This reduces the number of screens you need and simplifies your project. However, if you need to handle multilingual text, be aware that the OpenFaceplateInPopup function doesn’t support text arguments in multiple languages.

Tips for Converting Faceplates

When moving faceplates from Comfort to Unified, direct copying won’t work. Here’s a step-by-step approach to make the conversion easier:

1. Copy Visual Elements: Move elements from the faceplate definition to a blank screen.
2. Run the Conversion Tool: Use the tool on this new screen to convert sizes, positions, fonts, and colors (all aesthetic properties).
3. Create a New Faceplate: Group select all objects from the conversion tool, and create a new faceplate.
4. Re-link Dynamics: Manually update dynamizations and tag linking.
5. Event Interface: Configure it as needed.

If your faceplates are complex, this approach can save a lot of time, as the conversion tool will handle all visual properties, allowing programmers to focus on quickly re-linking tags.

Leveraging JavaScript Scripting in Unified

WinCC Unified supports JavaScript, adding a new level of flexibility. You can use it to enhance screens, events, and object properties, making your HMI more powerful and customizable.

1. Nested Faceplates:

• Benefits: Nested faceplates allow for advanced graphics and cleaner architecture.
• Cautions: Avoid overusing nested faceplates and complex scripts to prevent performance issues. Efficiently manage variables and use Global Definitions to keep your code organized and avoid artifacts in the HMI simulator.

Additional Resources

For further reading and detailed guidance, check out these resources:

• SIMATIC WinCC Unified Tips and Tricks for Scripting (JavaScript)
• Data2Unified Tool Documentation
• “Getting Started with WinCC Unified”
• Developing Unified JavaScript with VSCode

Upgrading from WinCC Comfort to Unified might seem like a big task, but with the right approach and tools, you can handle the transition smoothly.

Are you looking to upgrade your existing systems to WinCC Unified? DMC’s team of Automation engineers have extensive experience and can help with conversions and migrations of any size. Contact us today to discuss your project needs.

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Siemens TIA Portal V18 and WinCC Unified offer effective solutions for setting up user logins, increasing the safety of your operations as a result. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of adding local users, runtime rights, and protecting your HMI features in a few simple steps.

Setting Up Users and Rights

The first step is to set up the user profiles for your project. You can set specific rules for password complexity under ‘Security settings’ > ‘Settings.’

Next, navigate to ‘Security settings’ and then to ‘Users and roles.’

In the ‘Users’ tab you can create a new local user profile. To do this, you will need to click on ‘<Add New User>’ and then ‘Add new local user.’ Next, you can enter in a ‘User name’ and ‘Password.’ Here you can also define a timeout, which will automatically log the user out after a certain amount of time. This is also where you will assign roles to each listed user, but we’ll return to this after setting up some roles.

Assigning Roles 

Next, let’s go over ‘Roles’ and ‘Rights.’ Each role is comprised of a set of selected rights. ‘Runtime rights’ are what we will reference while programming protected or user restricted features on the HMI.

To create and name your own custom rights, navigate to the ‘Roles’ tab and then to the ‘User-specific runtime rights.’ Here you can create new rights with custom names and descriptions.

As an example, I have created 4 levels of rights and users as shown above: ‘Admin,’ ‘Maintenance,’ ’Technician,’ and ‘Operator.’ Admin will have the highest level of rights, followed by Maintenance, then Technician, and finally Operator with the lowest level of rights.

To set up the roles for our example setup, return to the ‘Runtime rights’ tab, and then click on ‘Operator’ in the Roles window. This screen will show the HMIs and PLCs available in the project.

For this example, we will set up the runtime rights for the WinCC Unified SCADA device by clicking on the drop down, selecting the device, and then selecting the custom runtime right we created earlier: ‘Operator Rights.’ Since ‘Operator’ has the lowest level of rights, we will only check ‘Operator Rights’ for the ‘Operator’ role.

For the other 3 roles, we will assign the rights as shown below:

Technician – Operator Rights, Technician Rights

Maintenance – Operator Rights, Technician Rights, Maintenance Rights

Admin – Operator Rights, Technician Rights, Maintenance Rights, Admin Rights

When set up this way, a feature that needs to be protected by a user login can be sorted according to the permission hierarchy rules we defined earlier.

The ‘Admin’ user can access anything protected by one of our custom rights, but the ‘Operator’ user can only access those protected by ‘Operator Rights.’ There are many other system defined rights available in which you can also assign to your custom roles if needed.

Creating User-Restricted HMI Features

Next, we will go through how to reference these roles while programming protected features on the HMI. In the example below, we want to restrict the ability to interact with the I/O Field to the Admin user. Navigate to the ‘Security’ dropdown and select ‘Admin Rights’ for the Authorization field.

This will limit interaction with this IO Field to the Admin user only. If you wanted a different level of access, you could choose from any of the other rights available to tailor the access to your needs. This setting is available for most other objects available in WinCC Unified. For anything that you want to restrict with a user login, you can set an Authorization level here.

Downloading User information to HMI

After you’ve made user or role changes it is important to set the dropdown below to ‘Reset to start values.’ This ensures that your changes get updated in runtime.

That’s it! Your basic user login setup is complete. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can establish user authentication mechanisms tailored to your equipment’s requirements.

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This demo was done in Windows 10 using TIA Portal V17. There may be slight differences with other versions.

Importing Graphics

WinCC Unified makes having nice-looking faceplates easy by allowing you to import premade graphics. In this demo, we will create a faceplate for a barcode scanner, using an image of a barcode as the graphic.

Once the project has been set up, navigate to the “Toolbox” tab on the right side of the screen and expand the “Graphics” dropdown. Click the icon to link a new folder, and set the path to the destination where your desired graphics are located. Feel free to give the folder a unique name.

The folder will appear under “My graphics folder.” Selecting the “Graphics” folder displays the barcode graphic in the window below.

Creating a Faceplate

To create a faceplate, navigate to the libraries tab on the right side of the screen. Expand “Project Library” and “Types,” and then  select “Add new type.” We want to create a Unified Faceplate, so select the faceplate option and check the unified bubble. Don’t forget to name the faceplate.

To add the imported graphic to the faceplate, we will need to create a graphic type. Repeat the previous steps and select the graphic type. Give the graphic type a name. Select the graphics folder and drag/drop the graphic into the Default graphic box. You may need to re-add your graphics folder so that it appears in the Toolbox tab.

Right click the version number with the orange cone next to it under the graphic type in the project tree and click “Release version.” You can leave the options as default and click ok.

Open the scanner faceplate again, and you should be able to drag/drop the barcode graphic from the project tree into the scanner faceplate.

I like to position my faceplates in the top left corner to make them as compact as possible. The position of objects can be adjusted from the Properties tab while selected.

Be sure to adjust the size of the faceplate window to reasonably fit your faceplate. In this case, I want it to match the size of the barcode graphic, so I am making those dimensions equal to each other. In order to change the size of the faceplate window, you must first click on empty background space.

Adding UDTs

Before you can begin adding more features to your faceplate, you will need to add the scanner datatype.

To do this, take your PLC data type, drag it over to the project library window and drop it in the “types” folder (or any sub folder).

Press OK in the popup. You should see the top right corner of the datatype graphic become blacked out. This means that the datatype is linked in the library.

Next, reopen the faceplate and go to “Tag Interface” at the top. Name the UDT struct, set the Data type to “Struct” and, under “User data type structure,” select the UDT.

Adding Dynamic Features

I would like the barcode to turn red if there is an error. To do this, add a rectangle over the barcode graphic and match the sizes.

Select the rectangle and find the “Background Color” property. Under the “Dynamization” drop down, select “Tag.”

Check the “Single bit” bubble since the tag we will be reading is a Boolean. For integer data types, the range setting can be used for multiple different conditions.

Assign the tag to the bError tag from the tag interface. When bError is false, we will set the transparency to 100% to make it invisible. When bError is true, we will set the transparency to 60% to make the barcode graphic appear red.

This functionality can also be accomplished by making the “Visibility” property dynamic, but we want to use this same rectangle to open a popup in a later step, so making it transparent will work better for this use case.

Making a popup faceplate

We want a popup to appear when clicking our scanner faceplate on the screen. Begin by creating another faceplate with the same settings as before. Then, add another tag interface with the same UDT.

On the popup we will have a status string display and a trigger button. For the text box, add dynamization to the text property, and link it to the status string tag from the tag interface. For the trigger button, go to the events tab next to properties, and press the yellow icon to convert the function list to a script.

Then, in the release event, right click and navigate to Snippets > HMI Runtime > Tag > Write Tag. This will insert a chunk of code that will allow you to write to your HMI tag. Make sure writing from the HMI is enabled on this tag for this to work.

Release the scanner popup version.

Opening the Popup

To open the popup, begin by reopening the barcode faceplate. Select the rectangle and navigate to events. In the press key event, convert it to a script. Right click > Snippets > Faceplate > Open faceplate in popup to get the premade open popup code.

I modified the premade code to use a configuration string from the property interface to set the title that will appear at the top of the window. This will be useful if multiple instances of this faceplate will be used so that different names can be assigned to different instances (Scanner 1, Scanner 2, etc.).

The data variable is used to pass the same UDT variables from the faceplate into the popup.

I want the popups to open near the location of the faceplate, so I set the relevant popup parameters (po.top, po.left) equal to the top left corner of the faceplate instance (item.top, item.left).

Instancing the Faceplate

Now that the functionality is finished, release the faceplate version.

Navigate to the screen and drag/drop the faceplate from the project library onto the screen.

In the properties window under Interface, link the relevant HMI tag. Enter “Scanner 1” into the TitleString property to give this scanner popup a unique name.

Now, we are ready to run our project and test our screen!

Here you can see the screen with the faceplate instance. Clicking on the barcode graphic opens the popup with the status string and trigger button. At the top of the popup window, you can see the TitleString denoting this instance of the popup as “Scanner 1.”

Now, you have the tools you need to make your own faceplates in WinCC Unified!

Learn more about DMC’s WinCC programming expertise and contact us for your next project.

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