Technical Reference

  • Advanced Viewer processes.
  • Point properties.
  • Item/group deletion.
  • Advanced Viewer limitations.

Advanced Viewer Processes

The following processes need to be running for the Advanced Viewer to work. If there is an issue you can check the Windows Task Manager to see if the following files are running.

Process File Listed in Task Manager
CIMPLICITY Router w32rtr.exe
OPC Communications program ptopc.exe
OPC Server selected for the Advanced Viewer Depends on selected OPC Server. Example ATLSimServer.exe

Point Properties

The Advanced Viewer can dynamically change the point properties that are available through the Advanced Viewer, in response to changes in the OPC Server.

Important: Dynamically changing point properties requires an OPC Server that implements the IOPCBrowse interface as part of the OPC DA 3.0 specifications.

The OPC DA 3.0 server must implement IOPCBrowse::GetProperties and populate the ItemID member of the OPCITEMPROPERTY structure with the Name of an Item whose value is the value of the property.

Please refer to sections 4.2.14, 4.3.6.2 and 6.7.7 of the "OPC Data Access Custom Interface Standard Version 3.00" for more details.

The OPC Server standard descriptions and property ID's that correspond to the CIMPLICITY properties are as follows.

CIMPLICITY OPC Server
Property Standard Description  ID Comments
Description Item Description 101 Fixed
Display Format No concept in OPC - Configurable
High Display Limit High EU 102 Configurable
Low Display Limit Low EU 103 Configurable
EU Label EU Units 100 Fixed
Enumeration Strings EU Information 8 Fixed

The following line in the PTopc_config.xml file enables this functionality.

<item_property_subscriptions>TRUE</item_property_subscriptions>

Note: FALSE disables this functionality.

Item/Group Deletion

Items can now be deleted from a group before the group is removed.

The following line in the PTopc_config.xml file enables this functionality.

<RemoveItemsOnRemoveGroup>TRUE</RemoveItemsOnRemoveGroup>

Note: FALSE or no entry does not delete items before the group is removed. When set to False, items are not explicitly removed on the client side; in that case the assumption is that the server will remove them.

Advanced Viewer Limitations

The Advanced Viewer currently has the following limitations.

  • Security is the responsibility of your OPC server.
  • The following are not currently provided with the Advanced Viewer.
  • Logging for values collected through the Advanced Viewer.
  • Alarming for these items.
  • You cannot use Advanced Viewer item ID tags in EMRP scripts; they can be used in CimEdit scripts.
  • Array set points are not supported in CimView.
  • You must manually configure the ptopc_config.xml file.
  • The Advanced Viewer system does not recover if the Advanced Viewer service crashes. You must stop and restart the Viewer.

Note: You can stop the Viewer in the CIMPLICITY Options dialog box or stop the Router in the Task Manager; you may have to stop your OPC Server.