Overview of the OPC UA DA Collector

The OPC UA Data Access (DA) collector gathers and collects data from a OPC UA 1.0-compliant OPC UA DA server (such as CIMPLICITY). The collector automatically determines the capability of the OPC UA DA server to which it is connected, and supports the appropriate features based on this information.

Features:
  • You can browse the source for tags and their attributes on an OPC server that supports browsing.
  • Both the polled and unsolicited data collection are supported; when changes to the OPC source tags are detected, they are sent to the Historian server. Unsolicited data collection is supported for OPC 2.0 only. The minimum poll interval is 100ms. The collector duplicates raw samples from the OPC server into the Historian data archive.

    For unsolicited data collection, if collector compression is disabled, all new values produce an exception. And, the deadband percentage is determined by the collector deadband percent. You can only configure the collector deadband percent by enabling compression.

  • The supported timestamp resolution is 1ms.
  • Floating point, integer, binary, and string data are supported.
  • Python expression tags are supported.
  • Device timestamps are accepted.
Supported data types:
OPC UA DA Collector Data Type Recommended Data Type in Historian
OpcUaType_Null ihTKVariableString
OpcUaType_Boolean ihTKBool
OpcUaType_SByte ihTKByte
OpcUaType_Byte ihTKByte
OpcUaType_Int16 ihTKInteger
OpcUaType_UInt16 ihTKUInt16
OpcUaType_Int32 ihTKDoubleInteger
OpcUaType_UInt32 ihTKUInt32
OpcUaType_Int64 ihTKInt64
OpcUaType_UInt64 ihTKUInt64
OpcUaType_Float ihTKFloat
OpcUaType_Double ihTKDoubleFloat
OpcUaType_DateTime ihTKVariableString
OpcUaType_Guid ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_StatusCode ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_String ihTKVariableString
OpcUaType_ByteString ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_XmlElement ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_NodeId ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_ExpandedNodeID ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_DiagnosticInfo ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_QualifiedName ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_LocalizedText ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_ExtensionObject ihTKDataTypeUndefined
OpcUaType_DataValue ihTKDataTypeUndefined
Supported tag attributes:
  • Tagname
  • Source Address
  • Engineering Unit Description
  • Data Type
  • Hi Engineering Units
  • Lo Engineering Units
  • Is Array Tag
The Engineering Unit Description, Hi Engineering Units and Lo Engineering Units vary based on the OPC server vendor.
Note: While some of these attributes are queried on a browse, they are not shown in the browse interface. These attributes are used when adding a tag, but it is not visible to you if all attributes come from the server or not.