User manual

Klinkmann Automation SPA Bus Server 27

SPA Server Ver 1.x User Manual Rev 2.3 120XXM23

The status of communication between the Server and InTouch can be read into Excel by

entering the following DDE reference formula in a cell on a spreadsheet (in following

examples spa02 is the Topic Name configured for SPA Server):

=view|DDEStatus!spa02

=view|IOStatus!spa02

Using the SPA Server with OPC Clients

The “OPC & DDE” version of SPA Server is accessible from OPC Clients (e.g.,

Wonderware OPCLink I/O Server) and DDE clients (e.g., Excel).

There are following general steps needed to access an OPC item from SPA Server:

1. Run OPC Client application and select the “SPA OPC and DDE Server” from the list

of available OPC Servers. If SPA Server currently is not running, it will start

automatically.

2. Create a new group (or topic if Wonderware OPCLink application is used).

3. If OPC Client supports the validating of items, validate the item before adding it.

4. Add the item. Depending on OPC Client it can be done in several different ways, for

example:

a) By entering separately the access path to topic name (valid topic name

configured in SPA Topic definition) and separately the item name.

b) By entering the full path to item name in the format TopicName.ItemName where

TopicName is the valid topic name configured in SPA Topic definition.

c) By browsing the server address space.

The SPA Server support item filtering by data category, data type and channel number

By default the SPA Server is installed and used as a local OPC Server -- both OPC

Server and OPC Client reside on same computer. The SPA Server can run also as a

remote OPC Server – in this case OPC Server and OPC Client are located on separate

computers. Accessing the remote OPC Server is same as for local OPC Server, but some

DCOM (Distributed COM) configuration is required before accessing the remote OPC

Server. The DCOM configuration must be done both on OPC Server and OPC Client

computers.

Configuring DCOM

To access SPA Server as a remote OPC Server, it is necessary to install SPA Server on

both (OPC Server and OPC Client) computers. Also the DCOM must be configured on

both computers.

After Server installation the System Administrator must configure DCOM by

Dcomcnfg.exe (or Dcomcnfg32.exe for Win9x) system tool. This utility is located in the

Windows system directory – e.g. in \WinNT\system32\ or \Win9x\system\.