Siemens SIMATIC S7-1500 Function Manual page 145

OPC UA communication
9.1 What you need to know about OPC UA
SIMATIC data type
DTL
Special note: You can only describe the structure com-
pletely with an OPC UA client. You have read-only access
individual elements of this structure (e.g. "YEAR")
CHAR
WCHAR
STRING
(Code page 1252 or Windows-1252)
WSTRING
(UCS-2; Universal Coded Character Set)
TIMER
COUNTER
Arrays
A read or write job with OPC UA is always an array access, which means that it always has
an index and length. A single tag is a special case of an array (index 0 and length 1). The
data type is simply sent repeatedly on the line. For the tags, the "DataType" attribute
indicates the basic data type. The attributes "ValueRank" and "ArrayDimensions" show
whether or not you are dealing with an array and how large the array is.
Data types based on arrays
There are SIMATIC data types for which an OPC UA value is mapped to an array of bytes.
An array of these data types is then mapped to a two-dimensional array.
Example: The SIMATIC data type DATE_AND_TIME (DT) is mapped on the OPC UA side to
an 8-byte array (Byte[8]), see table above. When you define an array of the SIMATIC data
type DATE_AND_TIME (DT), then it is considered as two-dimensional array.
This fact affects the use of system data types such as OPC_UA_NodeAdditionalInfo and
OPC_UA_NodeAdditionalInfoExt, for example:
For the data types described above, you must use the system data type
OPC_UA_NodeAdditionalInfoExt for multidimensional arrays instead of
OPC_UA_NodeAdditionalInfo.
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OPC UA data type
mapped as structure
CHAR
→ Byte
WCHAR
→ UInt16
STRING
→ String
String
TIMER
→ UInt16
COUNTER
→ UInt16
Function Manual, 11/2019, A5E03735815-AH
Communication