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Wonderware Connectivity Toolkits
Wonderware toolkits exemplify Wonderware’s extensibility and openness, promote adherence to industry standards, help improve ease of use, and enhance the ability to interface Wonderware products with other software and hardware products. They provide powerful extensibility to ArchestrA®-based and System Platform applications enabling developers to extend the capabilities of Wonderware products to meet specific system integration needs.
The Wonderware Toolkits package is utilized primarily by System Integrators, VARs, OEM, and sophisticated engineering departments of End Users and requires a relatively high level of programmer sophistication.
Wonderware offers the following Connectivity Toolkits:
ArchestrA DA Server Toolkit
The objective of Wonderware's ArchestrA® DA Server (DAS) Toolkit is to make building DA Servers easier. The new DA Server architecture is modular and therefore enables plug-ins for DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange), Suitelink, OPC® DA standard and other protocols as technology evolves and becomes available.
The DA Servers' modular architecture can accommodate the new plug-ins without recompilation. In addition, the graphical user interface (GUI) is detached from the main engine, enabling more detailed diagnostics, remote hot configuration and enhanced configuration files.
Highlights
- Modular architecture
- Detached GUI
- Remote configuration
- Transaction support, including unsolicited messages
- Multi-protocol capability
The ArchestrA DAS Toolkit offers the following components for building and running DA Servers:
- A set of C++ project wizards, including the DAS AppWizard, DAS Editor AppWizard and DAS Help AppWizard;
- Common files including Header, IDL interface and static library files;
- A set of common DAS components for configuration, runtime and utility functions;
- Sample code for several working servers; and
- Templates for installation and documentation.
ArchestrA Object Toolkit
The ArchestrA Object Toolkit (AOT) enables developers to extend the ArchestrA architecture with objects that provide specific application or device integration functionality. This toolkit is designed to shield end-users from the internal workings of the system, yet empowers them to fully leverage the integration of custom-coded ArchestrA Objects. Once created, ArchestrA Objects can be imported into the ArchestrA Galaxy Repository, configured and then deployed to an Application Engine.
The ArchestrA Object Toolkit enables the development of two broad classes of ArchestrA Objects:
- Application Objects – These domain objects represent plant equipment and instrumentation such as pumps, valves, temperature, transmitters and conveyors. They can represent plant processes or control strategies such as batches or control loops.
- Device Integration (DI) Objects – These domain objects represent controllers, PLCs and associated I/O networks. DI Objects are also used to integrate devices, usually by communicating through a DA Server or I/O Server.
ArchestrA Object Toolkit Components
- ObjectDesigner – the user interface
- Code Generation Wizard – uses Visual Studios C++ and C# projects for the primitives it creates
- Various manuals
- Utility primitives
- Sample projects
IndustrialSQL Server Software Development Kit
The IndustrialSQL Server™ (InSQL™) historian's Software Development Kit (SDK) enables the creation of high-value industrial applications that integrate with data sources from the Industrial Application Server (IAS) and other data sources. The primary goal of the InSQL SDK is to provide easy access to the IndustrialSQL Server historian's programming areas from within ArchestrA scripts and standalone .NET applications.
Benefits
You can build more efficient IAS applications as a result of:
- Direct API calls to the InSQL historian;
- Script programming from within IAS objects or templates;
- Reduced development time and faster time-to-market for a high-value custom applications; and
- Efficient network communication, which reduces network loading and frees network resources.
You can expand connectivity and unite islands of automation and information into one historian database because:
- The InSQL SDK facilitates the creation of custom interfaces to collect data for specific factory-floor devices, lab systems or SCADA data sources; and
- These custom interfaces contain all of the standard data communication services, e.g., Store and Forward.
You can institute continuous process improvements and reduce programming efforts by:
- Calculating and editing the data and then storing the result back to the history archive; and
- Performing data on-the-fly data calculations
Tasks
In addition, the InSQL SDK provides methods to perform the following tasks:
- Data storage
- Data retrieval
- Tag configuration
- Connection management and other "housekeeping" functions
Requirements
The InSQL SDK can be used within stand-alone .NET applications and written in any managed Common Language Runtime (CLR) language. It can also be used in conjunction with the Industrial Application Server's ArchestrA Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The InSQL SDK can be installed on the same node as the IndustrialSQL Server historian or on a remote node.
General Requirements
- IndustrialSQL Server 9.0 historian
- .NET Framework 1.1
Requirements for Use with the ArchestrA IDE
Industrial Application Server 2.0 P01, IAS 2.0 P02 or IAS 2.1
- The InSQL SDK can be installed on the Industrial Application Server's ArchestrA IDE or within a Galaxy Repository node.
- The InSQL SDK can be installed on a remote IDE node if the SDK Library is imported. For instructions on importing the library, see the SDK documentation.
Requirements for Use with a .NET Client Application
- Visual Studio .NET 2003 (which includes Visual C# .NET and Visual Basic .NET)
GRAccess Toolkit
Wonderware GRAccess (Galaxy Repository Access) Toolkit provides programmatic access to and interaction with Galaxy data. You can use the Wonderware® GRAccess object model to write programs that automate configuration of local and remote Galaxies, such as auto generating Templates or auto deploying an object. The utility/program that an engineer creates using the GRAccess Toolkit interacts with a Galaxy in a similar fashion to how the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) interacts with a Galaxy. The GRAccess Toolkit provides the key capabilities of reading and writing configuration data in the Galaxy Repository through a custom application program. The toolkit allows development using Visual Basic, C# or C++ and includes sample code and documentation for calling the necessary APIs.
The new GRAccess v3.0 release is enhanced to provide read-only accessibility to the Galaxy Security configuration and will support Visual Studio 2005 development environment. Support for Visual Studio 2005 provides a much richer interface for the developer and makes the toolkits more user friendly.
GRAccess Toolkit provides the ability to develop, manage and maintain solutions based on ArchestrA technology through a published application programmatic interface (API) to the Galaxy Repository Database. For example, in the SCADA market it may be desirable to deploy many pump stations over and over. The customer wants to enable an operator to do this task without being trained on the intricacies of IDE. Using the GRAccess Toolkit, such a GUI program for the Operator can be created. Another example is when a System Integrator wants to enable their customer to do simple and focused maintenance and/or customization of an application without exposing the full capabilities of IDE functionality. As another example, some End Users, OEMs and VARS want to create a configuration and development solution that interacts with several systems, all at once. There may be the need to change the configuration in a third party MES System along with the configuration in the Industrial Application Server application through a single custom software tool. GRAccess can be used to develop this.
MXAccess Toolkit
Wonderware MXAccess (Message eXchange) Toolkit provides programmatic access to runtime data in a Galaxy. The MXAccess Toolkit provides you with a lightweight mechanism for setting and getting attributes at runtime in ArchestrA objects. The toolkit enables an engineer to create components or programs that can access real-time data. The utility/program that an engineer creates using the MXAccess Toolkit interacts with a Galaxy in a similar fashion to how InTouchView interacts with a Galaxy. The MXAccess toolkit provides read and write access to any runtime data in a Galaxy and is built on the powerful Message Exchange system of ArchestrA. The toolkit allows development using Visual Basic, C# or C++ and includes sample code and documentation for calling the necessary APIs.
The new MXAccess v3.0 release is enhanced to support Visual Studio 2005 development environment. Support for Visual Studio 2005 provides a much richer interface for the developer and makes the toolkits more user friendly.
It is used by developers to write programs that automate reading and writing runtime data values in the attributes of ArchestrA objects. Use the MXAccess Toolkit to interface a program to ArchestrA Message Exchange. For example, a program created using the MXAccess Toolkit could pull runtime data from a Galaxy and connect to an ERP system using that data.
The Toolkit supports a simple, lightweight interface that permits:
- Connecting to an ArchestrA Galaxy
- Subscribing to one or more attributes and receiving data updates from these attributes
- Writing new values to these attributes
- Authenticating one or more users so that the program can write to attributes that require secured writes or verified writes. At minimum, a deployed ArchestrA Platform must exist on the computer running the client application.