Dealing with TIMESTRUCT

[crishoj]

In our ads-client application we target a PLC project that makes frequent use of TIMESTRUCT (instead of DATE_AND_TIME).

What do you think of potentially supporting automatic conversion of TIMESTRUCT to Javascript Date, similarly to how convertDatesToJavascript does for DT and DATE?

[jisotalo]

I also use the TIMESTRUCT alot. However, the issue here is that it's not in standard library.

If user creates a blank PLC project, the Tc2_utilities library, which has the struct, isn't included. So user can create it's own struct with the same name (however, I think it has different namespace in ADS).

Other issue is that the struct doesn't hold information about the timezone. When converting it, the struct might be UTC or local time.

Perhaps we could create some kind of a ads-client-utilities library that could hold functions like this and the logger previously discussed?

[crishoj]

So user can create it's own struct with the same name (however, I think it has different namespace in ADS).

In our case the imported TIMESTRUCT type appears over ADS to have the type <project name>.Tc2_Utilities.TIMESTRUCT.

There is also a typeGuid with value ad0299c9db7094e749e133c36a6b92a3, which (if I understand the purpose of type GUIDs in TwinCAT correctly) could be a candidate for identifying TIMESTRUCT from Tc2_Utilities.

some kind of a ads-client-utilities library

I like the idea of that.

Do you think it could be feasible to allow custom data type parsers as plugins?

Something like...

• ability to register a data type parser (by typeGuid or type name)
• type parsers must implement toBuffer and fromBuffer
• buildDataType checks for matching custom parser