The OPC Discovery Agent examines an OPC server and finds all of the items associated with that server.
You select the OPC Discovery Agent on the Select a Discovery Agent page of the Discovery Agent Selection Wizard.
This section explains how to use the Discovery Agent Selection Wizard to choose the OPC Discovery Agent and to extract item information from an OPC server. When you click the Finish button at the end of the wizard the item information is extracted from the selected OPC server, is read by the Discover and Auto Configure, and is then displayed in the spreadsheet.
The following table describes the columns exclusive to the OPC Discovery Agent that are displayed in the spreadsheet.
Discovery Agent Section Columns
|
Column Name |
Description |
|
Name |
The name of the item. |
|
Fully Qualified ItemID (Comments) |
The I/O address of the item, as returned by the OPC server. This information can be copied to the Description field in the target application section of the spreadsheet .If the call fails, this field is left blank. The OPC client driver uses this field to auto-generate the I/O address field in the target database tab. If this field is blank, the driver will not auto-generate the I/O address. You must then enter the I/O address manually. |
|
OPC Tag Status |
The status of each item since it was last scanned from the OPC server. For more information on tag statuses, see The Discovery Agent Section in the Discover and Auto Configure Application topic. |
After selecting the items you want to add to the database and using the applicable iFIX wizards, the I/O addresses are automatically created in the target application section of the spreadsheet. Using the server and group you selected from the Driver Wizard, the application converts each fully qualified item ID into an I/O address that can be used by iFIX and the OPC Client driver.
