Scanning for devices and boxes

When creating a new configuration it is often necessary to align the TwinCAT XAE configuration to the actually available hardware. One option to fullfill this is to start a new TwinCAT XAE configuration from scratch and process the following steps:

Creation of a new TwinCAT XAE configuration
Setting the address of the target system
Scan of the available devices
Addition and parametrization of the devices to be used
Scanning and insertion of boxes for each device

Procedure

The procedure to create the ITcSysManager interface (the 'systemManager' instance here) is described in the chapter Accessing TwinCAT Configurations. This interface has a LookupTreeItem method that returns a ITcSmTreeItem pointer to a specific tree item given by its pathname, in this case the shortcut "TIID" which references the I/O devices node.

Code snippet (C#):

ITcSysManager3 systemManager = null; 

public void ScanDevicesAndBoxes() 
{      
  systemManager.SetTargetNetId("1.2.3.4.5.6");
  ITcSmTreeItem ioDevicesItem = systemManager.LookupTreeItem("TIID"); 
  string scannedXml = ioDevicesItem.ProduceXml(false);
  XmlDocument xmlDoc = newXmlDocument();      
  xmlDoc.LoadXml(scannedXml);
  XmlNodeList xmlDeviceList = xmlDoc.SelectNodes("TreeItem/DeviceGrpDef/FoundDevices/Device");      
  List<ITcSmTreeItem> devices = newList<ITcSmTreeItem>(); 
  int deviceCount = 0;
  foreach (XmlNode node in xmlDeviceList)     
  {
    int itemSubType = int.Parse(node.SelectSingleNode("ItemSubType").InnerText);          
    string typeName = node.SelectSingleNode("ItemSubTypeName").InnerText; 
    XmlNode xmlAddress = node.SelectSingleNode("AddressInfo");      
    ITcSmTreeItem device = ioDevicesItem.CreateChild(string.Format("Device_{0}",++deviceCount),itemSubType,string.Empty,null);
    string xml = string.Format("<TreeItem><DeviceDef>{0}</DeviceDef></TreeItem>",xmlAddress.OuterXml); 
    device.ConsumeXml(xml);
    devices.Add(device);      
  }
  foreach (ITcSmTreeItem device in devices)     
  {
    string xml = "<TreeItem><DeviceDef><ScanBoxes>1</ScanBoxes></DeviceDef></TreeItem>"; 
    try
    {
      device.ConsumeXml(xml);
    }
    catch (Exception ex)          
    {
      Console.WriteLine("Warning: {0}",ex.Message);
    } 
    foreach (ITcSmTreeItem box in device)
    {
      Console.WriteLine(box.Name);
    }
  }
}