Vijeo Designer Version Control with Tortoise SVN

I was working with Vijeo Designer 5.0 on a recent project and, overall, found it rather enjoyable to work with. Vijeo Designer is the Schneider Electric / Telemecanique programming software for the Magelis XBT-GT HMI's along with several other SCADA platforms.

The creation of variables let me organize my I/O into logical folders, the alarm setup was intuitive and let me create specific groups en mass, and the page designer let me create an object with pretty much any look and feel that I wanted by using object properties and animations. However, one thing that I found troublesome is that the project files that it creates for your HMI project are very difficult to version.

Vijeo Designer does create auto backups, which came in handy more than once, but if you want to save your continual progress, you basically have to create a brand new project. To provide myself with a more robust versioning capability I decided to setup my Vijeo Designer project with Tortoise SVN, a free, open-source package that we use for version control of LabVIEW, Visual Studio .Net, and Siemens projects to name a few.

It took me a few tries to get the logistics of this, so I felt it was a good idea to share it with anyone else who might find the need to revision control their Vijeo Designer software.

1. Create a new project in Vijeo Designer

2. Locate the Vijeo Designer project folder. This is setup when you install Vijeo Designer and is typically called “Vijeo-Manager”

3. Rename the Vijeo-Manager folder to “Vijeo-Manager-Temp”

4. Follow the Tortoise SVN documentation to create a new, empty repository (if you don’t have Tortoise SVN, get it here)

5. Create a new, empty folder in the same directory as Vijeo-Manager-Temp called “Vijeo-Manager” and check out the SVN repository to this folder

6. Copy the entire contents of the Vijeo-Manager-Temp folder to the Vijeo-Manager folder

7. Add the following file extensions to the svn ignore list: “.swxTMP” and “.tmp”

8. Add the following folders to the svn ignore list: “<Project Name>\Build” and “<Project Name>\DataFilesBackup” (where <Project Name> is the name of your project)

9. Commit the Vijeo-Manager directory

This completes the procedure. You should now be able to use SVN to version control your Vijeo Designer project, using the commit, revert, and update functions from the Windows right click interface. This will provide you with reliable backup and version control while you develop your HMI software and allow you to share the project among different developers!