In the post IEC 61131-3: Additional language extensions, I briefly described the UNION. A reader comment has pointed out to me the possibility, that a UNION can also be expanded by EXTENDS. Since this simplifies the handling of a UNION and the norm does not indicate that, I would like to introduce this possibility in a (very) short post.

As already described in a post, a UNION makes it possible to define your own data types, all elements of which share the same storage space. Here is once more the example, where a 16-bit variable can be accessed individually to the low byte and the high byte. First, a structure consisting of two bytes is created.

TYPE U_Test :
UNION
  nVar1   : WORD;
  stVar2  : ST_Bytes;
END_UNION
END_TYPE

TYPE ST_Bytes :
STRUCT
  nLSB   : BYTE;
  nMSB   : BYTE;
END_STRUCT
END_TYPE

This example shows how the lower byte (LSB) and the higher byte (MSB) are determined from a variable of type WORD without bit operations.

PROGRAM MAIN
VAR
  uVar    : U_Test;
  nA, nB  : BYTE;
END_VAR

uVar.nVar1 := 16#1234;
nA := uVar.stVar2.nLSB; // Value: 16#34 (LSB)
nB := uVar.stVar2.nMSB; // Value: 16#12 (MSB)

EXTENDS for UNIONS

The same task can also be solved with inheritance, which is a bit more elegant. In this case, the union U_Test inherits from ST_Bytes.

TYPE U_Test EXTENDS ST_Bytes :
UNION
  nVar1 : WORD;
  // stVar2 : ST_Bytes; // Not necessary, is inherited from ST_Bytes.
END_UNION
END_TYPE

Access to nLSB and nMSB no longer needs to be done via a variable explicitly declared in the UNION.

uVar.nVar1 := 16#1234;
nA := uVar.nLSB; // Value: 16#34 (LSB)
nB := uVar.nMSB; // Value: 16#12 (MSB)

Author: Stefan Henneken

I’m Stefan Henneken, a software developer based in Germany. This blog is just a collection of various articles I want to share, mostly related to Software Development. View all posts by Stefan Henneken