Difference between revisions of "EclipseSCADA/GettingStarted/ESAC"

Latest revision as of 04:40, 19 May 2014

The Eclipse SCADA Administration Client (ESAC)

Download the "Eclipse SCADA Administration Client" (http://www.eclipse.org/eclipsescada/downloads.html). The Client is available as a simple zip file for Windows, Linux and Mac. Additionally for Windows there is a MSI installer available.

Java 7+
ESAC requires Java 7+ When installing the application using the MSI packages the installer won't display an error when Java7+ is not found. Still the application won't work!

The ESAC is primarily used for two things: Peeking into a running system, to browse tags/items, and to deploy configurations to a running Equinox based SCADA application. You can also use it to show the historical data and browse alarms and events.

Connections

Eclipse SCADA supports 3 basic (home grown) protocols:

1. net/gmpp (the old protocol)
2. ngp (the current protocol)
3. sfp (in development, compact, less features but efficiently to implement, supports only DA)

Generally the standard protocol which is used throughout Eclipse SCADA is ngp. It supports flexible timeouts, streaming compression, ssl, callbacks.

On top of the basic protocol there exist 4 variants:

1. da (Data Acquistion)
2. ae (Alarms & Events)
3. hd (Historical Data)
4. ca (Configuration Administrator)

The reason for that is that it reduces the surface of the API, so you wouldn't need to have to include all ae/hd/ca functionality if you are only interested in DA. The consequence of it is, that each variant needs its own port. Maybe in the future there will be a wrapper that supports all variants over one connection, but for now that doesn't exist.

To connect to a Eclipse SCADA Server, you need to connect using an Eclipse SCADA URL. This takes the following shape:

 [da|ae|hd|ca]:[net|ngp|sfp]://[[<username>]:<password>@]<host>:<port>[?<option>=<option value>[&<option>=<option value>]]

Examples:

 da:ngp://localhost:2101
 da:ngp://demo.openscada.org:2101
 ca:ngp://myuser:mypassword@scada.example.org:2401?timeout=240000

All ports can be chosen freely, but within the project we use defined standard ports.

URL Options are documented here.

Adding connections

Within the ESAC, connections may be stored in 3 different places:

1. standard file source
2. user settings
3. system settings

standard file source

Stores the configuration within the OSGi configuration area. When a new version of the ESAC is installed, the connections are lost.

user settings

The recommended place, to store the connections. The connections get stored per user. For that the standard java preferences API is used, so the actual storage is different depending on the platform (Registry on Windows, Home folder on Linux).

system settings

Available to every user, but only an administrator can actually store connections there.

The Connections tree

The Nodes where the connections can be created where already discussed above. There are other Nodes which are essentially a view on the existing connections.

OSGi Connection Services

Displays automatically registered connections. Since every explicitely added connection gets also registered, they will appear here as well.

All Connections

A flat list of all connections.

By target

Creates one hierarchy level based on the hostname.

By Uri

Creates a hierarchy based on the URL, with separate Levels for each part.

The perspectives

For each topic there is a separate perspective. So there are perspectives for DA, CA, AE and HD (Chart).

The DA perspective

The DA perspective shows on the left hand side all connections and on the right a real time list. After adding a DA connection, you can open the connection using a double click or the context menu. If the server is available and the user is allowed to connect, the connection changes its state to BOUND eventually. After that, depending on the capabilities of the server, a item tree should appear. The tree consists of folders and items. Items can be dragged from the tree to the realtime list.

Within the realtime list the current value of the item is displayed. The item generally consists of following elements:

1. id
2. primary value
3. type
4. connection state
5. attributes

The CA perspective

The DA perspective shows on the left hand side all connections and on the right an empty area. After adding a CA connection, you can open the connection using a double click or the context menu. If the server is available and the user is allowed to connect, the connection changes its state to BOUND eventually. After that a list of child nodes should appear. These are the available factories which are responsible for item creation within the (master) server.

To export the current configuration, right click on the connection and select "Export Configuration". Select a file where to store it and click "Finish". The complete runtime configuration of the server gets now storevd as an oscar file.

To import/update the current configuration, right click on the connection and select "Import Configuration". Select the configuration file to import and click on next (Alternatively if you just want to load the one still chosen, then just click on load). Then press next. On the next page you could either chose to create a diff against the currently connected server (press Load from Server), or just select an exported file (Load from local File). It should then display the number of loaded entries. Press next to reach the screen to remove factories from consideration for applying. Press next again to reach the screen which shows the diff between the previously selected configurations. Here you can easily compare what the import of the new configuration would actually change. If you are satisfied, just press "Finish", otherwise go back or cancel the import.