In PL7 there is no size restriction for program sections.
Sections of 1000 rungs are existing and that leads to several drawbacks:
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Performances in edition (opening, inserting lines in a section) may take long time.
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Performance during online modifications may take some time, since the whole section is analyzed, compiled and transferred.
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Online modification of a big section may drive to switch back offline to perform the modification.
A splitting feature is implemented, which splits LD sections at a given amount of networks, if no jump scope is active.
Before starting the converting process in Control Expert the Networks per Section option can be set via Tools → Options. You can select a value of 1 to 30 networks per section.
A section may contain jumps to labels. A jump is located inside the section.
The converter takes jumps inside the section into account since it is not allowed to have a jump from one section to another. Depending on how the jump is validated inside the section (active or not), the automatic splitting at network bounds is inhibited (if active).
The feature of recognizing jump scopes can be suppressed by the Ignore jumps when splitting option. This option can be set via Tools → Options in Control Expert. If this option is set, automatic section splitting always takes place regardless of jumps. Therefore many error messages concerning jump targets will be generated at analyze time.
NOTE: There are forward and backward jumps possible in PL7 applications.
If during conversion LD sections are split into smaller sections, Functional Modules will be created in Control Expert.
The functional modules are named as the original sections in PL7.
A functional module collects all parts of the original section.
