PCo 2.1 connecting via OPC HDA to Uniformance PHD server

[Former Member]

Hi Everyone,

Just a shout for help / suggestions / ideas. Our company is currently trying to use PCo 2.1 connectingto a Honeywell Uniformance PHD server.

In PCo I entered my server name in, it shows up as:

Uniformance PHD OPC HDA Server, HDA 1.20 specification. Prog ID OPC.PHDServerHDA.1

looks all OK, I set up my agent instance and now I cannot seem to browse for any tags or even when I set up a MII tag query transaction it just returns with Tag not found errors.

When I try to browse for tags (either through Alias or Subscription tag of my agent instance) it just returns me a folder called "localhost" and there are no tags being displayed.

Is there more config to be done on the PHD side (which is another team) to expose tags to PCo ?

I can load up Matrikon OPC HDA Explorer and I notice I can't browse for tags as well, but I can manually add a tag (entering the right name) and read raw values from it OK.

Have I missed a DCOM security setting somewhere?

When I start up the agent instance everything looks ok? Any ideas to look into would be appreciated, I went through the security guide and double checked my dcom settings

Regards,

Danny

[Former Member]

quick update... found out our Uniformance PHD server has browse mode turned off...

after activating it we can now browse a list of tags from our PHD (which is enormous sigh)

When I try to execute a tag query in MII I'm getting errors such as:

"Unable to get COM browser"

"Unable to decode an error code"

"error executing Directives of Tag Query"

I have demand caching set for my Tag Query options in my agent instance.

just wondering if anyone would be able to shed some light on what is going on?

[Former Member]

oh well I guess I stumbled upon my own answer... the only way I got it working was to define aliases in PCo, enter the tag names we wanted and limit the tag query to Alias query (specifying the alias I created in PCo source system).

If we left it on demand or any other setting I'd see PCo get a list of all the tags on our PHD server and take a very long time doing so and crash. While in MII workbench if I tried to do a tag query it'd just time out or give me funny COM browser errors.

I guess the only question I have is, is there a way to stop PCo from scanning our PHD for the entire tag list (or just scan a small subset of them initially) or do we have to use the Alias functionality to achieve that effect?