TN AppSvr147 Using FSGateway with the ArchestrA Object for OPC Connectivity
Description
The purpose of this document is for any 3rd party client who needs to communicate to an ArchestrA galaxy with the attributes exposed. This document’s purpose is not for communication initiated from the galaxy to an OPC source.
Many customers use other programs that need to communicate to a few attributes in Galaxy such as OSI PI or even Microsoft Excel.
There are some steps that we need to take to set up FSGateway, as well as bring in the galaxy runtime attributes that we need to have exposed in FSGateway.
- Author: Glenn Yancey
- Published: 07/20/2015
- Applies to: System Platform 2012 and higher
Details
Exporting Attributes from Galaxy and importing them into FSGateway (Protocol converter).
Unfortunately, FSGateway does not come equipped with a Galaxy Browser to automatically expose and import Galaxy Attributes into the Device Items list. The process below shows how to accomplish this.
1) Open up the Microsoft SQL Server (2008 or 2012) Management Studio.
2) Access the Database that is the name of your Galaxy.
3) Inside of that database is a VIEW called dbo.internal_runtime_attributes
4) I’ve written a query that can be used to pull back all attributes to filter out attributes that may come from templates whose instances we may not need at this moment. This initial query has been designed to see if my filter works.
USE InsertDatabaseName
SELECT [full_attribute_name] ,[datatype], [area] ,[template]
FROM [InsertDatabaseName].[dbo].[internal_runtime_attributes]
WHERE Template NOT IN ('$Galaxy', '$Symbol', '$ClientControl', '$ViewEngine')
AND Area <> '<UnAssigned>'
5) Once satisfied, I take that query and customize it once more to only retrieve ‘[full_attribute_name]’ twice. This way, we can use the exported result set to import into the FSGateway program.
6) You can then save the result by right clicking on the result set, and selecting “Save Result As” to save this as a .CSV file.
Configure FS Gateway to use ArchestrA Object and ArchestrA Group
1) After the installation of FSGateway, open up the System Management Console to access the FSGateway inside of the DAServer Manager.
2) Right click under the Configuration of FSGateway to select the Archestra Object. In this example, I renamed this to “Galaxy”.
3) The ArchestrA Object doesn’t require to be configured. However, if you intend on writing back to these attributes, then you will need to supply valid credentials to write back to the attributes. Please see the chapter on Security and “security groups” in the ArchestrA User’s Guide for more information on write back capabilities to objects based on Roles and operational permissions.
Add the ArchestrA Group object below. In this example, I renamed this object to SA2014 to coincide with the name of my Galaxy.
4) Notice that the Device Group Name that now shows up is “Galaxy_SA2014”. I will ending up using that as my Topic or ScanGroup for any DDE or OPC connection to the Galaxy.
5) Now I can import my Device Items list from the CSV file that I created earlier from the SQL Server Enterprise Studio.
6) The list below can now be utilized to link to any external variable to these Galaxy attributes below.
7) For DDE connectivity, you will not be able to run FSGateway as a Service. You will need to start FSGateway as a program. “C:\Program Files (x86)\Wonderware\DAServer\FSGateway\Bin\FSGateway.exe”.
a. This file could be started by a batch file or a shortcut in the Start Up group of Windows.
8) For OPC connectivity , FSGateway can run as a service.