Professional OPC
Development Tools

logos

lupa

Online Forums

Technical support is provided through Support Forums below. Anybody can view them; you need to Register/Login to our site (see links in upper right corner) in order to Post questions. You do not have to be a licensed user of our product.

Please read Rules for forum posts before reporting your issue or asking a question. OPC Labs team is actively monitoring the forums, and replies as soon as possible. Various technical information can also be found in our Knowledge Base. For your convenience, we have also assembled a Frequently Asked Questions page.

Do not use the Contact page for technical issues.

  1. Forum
  3. Discussions
  5. Feature Requests & Product Improvement Ideas
  7. Feature request

Feature request

More
26 Jan 2017 13:03 #4897 by olab
Replied by olab on topic Feature request
Thank you :-)

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
26 Jan 2017 13:01 #4896 by support
Replied by support on topic Feature request
Thank you. I think the basics are more or less clear now.

I do not think the COZYROC has information about creating UI configuration for the SSIS data sources (they just sell their components in binary form), but at least it shows that what is possible.

At this moment we are not "jumping" at such product enhancement, but I agree it is something to consider. In fact, we are currently working on an Office (Excel) "connector", and having more such adapters in future is one way in which the product can develop.

I will place this on the list, and if there are any news in this respect, I will make a post in this forum thread.

Thank you once again.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
23 Jan 2017 21:23 - 23 Jan 2017 21:24 #4878 by olab
Replied by olab on topic Feature request
Hei,

File Attachment:

File Name: OPCLabs.zip
File Size:69 KB

Please check out attached VS project. The script includes a Script component that connect to the OPC server and returns Timestamp, Value and Quality as output. Thees values can be led directly to a SQL connection. The script is NOT working right now bacause of some problems with the vtq object that I do not understand. I guess you see my goal here.

You are absolutly correct. What I want is to replace the script component with a "Wizard looking object" like the OLE connection where you can browse for server and tag. B)

There might be some information here about creating such an object here (hopefully) www.cozyroc.com/ssis/script-component

Kind regards

Ola
Attachments:
Last edit: 23 Jan 2017 21:24 by olab.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
23 Jan 2017 20:08 #4877 by support
Replied by support on topic Feature request
Thank you. Yes, what you describe should be doable.

I have looked into the documentation on how to create SSIS data sources, and there is one thing that I do not know yet: Where and how will be the "columns" of such OPC data source configured. I suppose it will give one row only, and each column will have a value read from some OPC item.

In the intro article, they do not talk much about it. They say that e.g. when the data source is configured with a SQL query, then the columns are given by that query. But in our case, we would ideally want to see some sort of UI browsing for the OPC items, right? We do have the code for the browsing - but it is not clear to me whether such thing can be hooked into SSIS to provide UI for OPC browsing when configuring the data source.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
21 Jan 2017 17:15 #4813 by olab
Replied by olab on topic Feature request
Hi,

At the moment this is just an idea, but I could have used this in a project I'm about to finalize.

I do not think subrscriptions is the way to go here. Syncronous reading from cache would be better.

Reading from 1 minutes through 1 hour to 1 day would be the frequences. The number of tags is hard to say, but I guess from 20 to 500 somewhere.

As you might have already seen, SSIS can run script blocks so I've just started testing to put a one shot reading with Server and Tagname as parameters and value, timestamp and quality as output inside such block and then reuse it :-)

Ola

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
21 Jan 2017 16:11 #4811 by support
Replied by support on topic Feature request
Thank you for clarification. I think I understand the way you want it to work.

My only concern is that in the OPC world, the "proper" way to (periodically) obtain data that change over time is with use of OPC subscriptions. They are optimized for performance. The repeated SSIS package execution would lead to periodic use of OPC (one-shot) reads instead (no subscriptions), and hence much less efficiency.

Whether this will work well depends mainly on the frequency (times number of tags involved). What do you think would be the typical frequencies of executing the task, and number of tags that need to be read?

Thank you

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
20 Jan 2017 19:52 - 20 Jan 2017 20:01 #4810 by olab
Replied by olab on topic Feature request

support wrote: Thank you very much for this - it is an interesting idea.
I do not know much about SSIS, but I looked at it and tied to understand the basics - and think about how it could work.

The issue I have is that in my understanding, SSIS normally works by running a package which does its tasks and then finishes, as kind of one-shot job. Accordingly, the data sources are static in the sense that they provide some data that the task can process, but the data does not change while the task is running - and the task is not observing the changes.

On the other hand, OPC data are usually dynamic, providing values over long period of time(actually permanently, in most cases), using subscriptions.

How would this fit into the SSIS model? Maybe because you know SSIS, you can give me your opinion. I can imagine two approaches currently:

1) Instead of having a short-running task, the task will not end - instead, the data source will be providing new records as the new values come, and it will "never end".

2) Or, maybe you had in mind a one-time reading of OPC data: In this case, the usual SSIS model will be used (with a task that runs from beginning to end). But no OPC subscriptions for values that change over the time. (and the task may be, of course, executed repeatedly as needed - but it will run separately each time it is invoked).

It is also possible that I have misunderstood the SSIS.

I would welcome any comments.

Best regards


Thank you for your response.

SSIS can be used to do lot's of stuff. Like modifying data, transfer data, maintain databases etc.

You're correct that SSIS is a one-shot package, but they can be set to run on schedule from the SQL management studio. My idea is that a package can read (one-shot) data from several OPC servers and tags and then do some stuff like sum values, loockup data fra existing SQL data, transfer data back to the opc server and store the result directly into the SQL server or any other database format.

My idea is to create a advanced datalogger (long-time). The web is full of OPC loggers but they basically connect one tag to one column in the SQL. I would like to e.g calculate Tag1+Tag2/Tag3^Tag4 and store the result in a specific database columns and still have full control on columnames etc. It would also be possible to fire stored procedures as part of such a package. Using SSIS this could be done graphically in a userfriendly environment developed and maintained by microsoft.

A full scale project could update the buiness ERP system directly as soon as a product leaves the production line by transfering material usage to the ERP warehouse and update production costs tables....

Kind regards

Ola
Last edit: 20 Jan 2017 20:01 by olab.

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
20 Jan 2017 19:09 #4809 by support
Replied by support on topic Feature request
Thank you very much for this - it is an interesting idea.
I do not know much about SSIS, but I looked at it and tied to understand the basics - and think about how it could work.

The issue I have is that in my understanding, SSIS normally works by running a package which does its tasks and then finishes, as kind of one-shot job. Accordingly, the data sources are static in the sense that they provide some data that the task can process, but the data does not change while the task is running - and the task is not observing the changes.

On the other hand, OPC data are usually dynamic, providing values over long period of time(actually permanently, in most cases), using subscriptions.

How would this fit into the SSIS model? Maybe because you know SSIS, you can give me your opinion. I can imagine two approaches currently:

1) Instead of having a short-running task, the task will not end - instead, the data source will be providing new records as the new values come, and it will "never end".

2) Or, maybe you had in mind a one-time reading of OPC data: In this case, the usual SSIS model will be used (with a task that runs from beginning to end). But no OPC subscriptions for values that change over the time. (and the task may be, of course, executed repeatedly as needed - but it will run separately each time it is invoked).

It is also possible that I have misunderstood the SSIS.

I would welcome any comments.

Best regards

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

More
20 Jan 2017 06:43 #4807 by olab
Feature request was created by olab
Hello,

I often use the SQL server integration services SSIS to handle and transform data that are to be stored in a SQL server or to be transfered between any other system. There you find a lot of different datasource, but, I miss a OPC connection there. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to point to any opc tag and drop it into a SQL table, DB2, FlatFile or whatever??

SSIS is more and more used by dataintegrators working with Datawarehouses and an opc datasource there would be really cool :-)


Of cource you can do some scripting to connect to opc, but I think that to develop an opc datasource would simply be perfect. :)

Kind regards

Ola

Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.

Moderators: support
  1. Forum
  3. Discussions
  5. Feature Requests & Product Improvement Ideas
  7. Feature request
Time to create page: 0.058 seconds