ClearSCADA 2007 R1.4 Release Notes

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ClearSCADA 2007 R1.4 is the fourth service pack release of ClearSCADA 2007 R1. This release contains a small number of product enhancements. Its main purpose is to resolve a number of known issues with ClearSCADA 2007 R1.3 to improve performance and reliability.

Product Enhancements

Security Improvements

• ClearSCADA user authentication mechanisms have been strengthened to further boost system security. These improvements apply to ViewX, WebX and the ODBC interface.

Following upgrade, existing ODBC DSNs will lose configured passwords. This can potentially impact report generation using Crystal Reports and external applications that use the ODBC interface. After upgrade, use the ODBC Data Source Administrator to reinstate ODBC DSN passwords where required.

• Read access to Event Journal entries for deleted objects are now restricted by checking the current user permissions against the database Root Group.

• To enhance security of the ClearSCADA server, telnet logging has now been disabled by default. As a further security measure, this interface no longer provides facilities for viewing system status information.

Telnet logging can be enabled using the new registry setting 'LogEnableTelnet'.

Logic

• Logic Status reporting has been improved to indicate the reason why logic execution is disabled (Not In Service, Member of a Template, ExecutionEnabled is False etc).

• Logic programs are now able to execute after they are imported without needing to be re-compiled.

• Support has been added for 64 bit integer type for directly located variables in Logic. For example, "%M(#HIS.Raw.Total Data)".

Diagnostic Logging Impovements

• New diagnostic classes called 'Journal New Records' and 'Historian New Records' have been added to log new event journal messages and new historic data records.

• DBClient logging has been improved to log the source IP Address when a client accepts an in-bound connection from a server.

• The exception handling thread has been improved to include the object Id in the exception report.

Quality Factor for PSTN Channels

• The algorithm for selecting the best available PSTN channel has been improved. Each channel is now allocated a quality that is incremented with each good call and decremented with each bad call, within a low to high quality range of 1 to 'n'. The channels with the highest quality are considered the best channels. When several channels have the same quality, a round-robin algorithm is applied to cycle amongst them. The value of 'n' is configurable in the 'Global Parameters\Channels' section of the server configuration and is used as the starting quality when the channel is initialized within the driver.

This algorithm offers significantly faster response as a previously healthy channel begins to fail.

• An additional method has been added to the PSTN channel to enable the call quality factor to be reset to its default.

Miscellaneous

• Support has been added for Version 6 licenses in this Service Pack release of ClearSCADA 2007 R1. This means licenses that have been upgraded to support later versions can be used to connect to ClearSCADA 2007 R1.4.

• New Server Registry settings called 'OldestClientVersion' and 'OldestClientBuild' have been added to allow system administrators to specify the minimum client version and build number that is allowed to connect to the server. The settings can be found in the Registry location HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Serck Controls\SCX6\Server.

• DBServer has been enhanced to better communicate with the operating system during system shutdowns and restarts. The operating system is now requested to delay it's shut down until DBServer has completed all pending actions. This ensures that very large systems have enough time to save all data and configuration to disk.

• The Id field in the CAlarm table is now a 'Reference' allowing it to be used with the De-Reference operator (->) in SQL.

• DriverODBC is now able to process "Text" columns in SQL Server.

DriverODBC will only read the first 65535 characters of any "Text" column.

• The 32 bit install kit has been modified to prevent accidental installation on 64 bit operating systems.

Resolved Issues

SCADAPack Modbus Driver

• The SCADAPack Modbus driver has been corrected to ensure that it does not exceed the 125 register limit. This occurred if a point spanned more than one register and the second, third or fourth register exceeded the register limit for the read.

• Polling of standard SCADAPack Modbus points has been corrected when attached to a RealFLO outstation to make sure the driver does not get caught in a loop if the polling of the standard points overlaps with the Flow Run poll.

DNP3 Driver

• Heartbeating has been corrected in the DNP3 to ensure an incorrect response will not leave the outstation in an invalid state.

• A bug has been fixed in the DNP3 Slave driver which could cause it to stop sending unsolicited messages. This occurred when the processing of the application confirm coincided with the scan of the value maps.

• Polling in the DNP3 driver has been corrected to make sure that an outstation with flaky comms will not hog the communications channel.

• Ensured that an out-of-sequence unsolicited message from a DNP3 outstation only triggers an integrity poll if the driver has completed starting comms with the outstation. The driver automatically performs an integrity poll during the process of starting comms to an outstation.

• The DNP3 driver has been modified so that it now gracefully handles an invalid object count of 0 in an application fragment and reports an error. The DNP3 translator has also been updated to show the errors which occur during processing.

• The DNP3 driver has been updated so that it sends the correct link status message for heartbeating requests on Network type channels using TCP. The DNP3 driver has also been updated to ensure that the application layer and data link layer states are reset following a TCP socket failure. Also link state is reset is the heartbeat or idle poll request fails.

Advanced Drivers

• A crash in Advanced Drivers has been fixed which could occur if a serial device signaled a write failure event when no write was actually in progress. This might occur, for example, when USB serial devices are unplugged.

• A fault has been fixed in the Network channel code which caused the channel to erroneously fail, when in UDP mode, if a certain non-fatal error was received from the Windows sockets layer when checking if there was any more data to read.

• A problem with Post-message RTS Delay in advanced drivers has been fixed; this could have led to the driver crashing if the delay was greater than 500ms.

• Advanced driver Tx/Rx eavesdrop channels now correctly report their state as healthy after both ports have received a valid message.

• The advanced driver architecture has been corrected so that the failure of the Tx port on a Tx/Rx eavesdropping channel does not cause the driver to crash.

• A crash in the Advanced Driver library which was caused by using long Host Addresses (DNS name) on TCP/IP type channels has been fixed.

• The Advanced Driver library has been modified to ensure writing to a port after a read/write failure will not lead to a crash.

Web client

• An issue with mimic animations has been fixed where an expression evaluation failure would write and empty/zero value to the target property in ViewX, but not in the web client. If this happened for an animation on a shared embedded mimic, the instance that failed would retain the value from a successful evaluation of a previous instance.

• The Str() function in the web client has been modified to use appropriate time zone settings when converting DATE values to strings.

• The web client has been modified to ensure animations using Username()/Locale() functions are updated when user changes when used on embedded mimics.

• Issues with dynamic position animations in the web client have been fixed.

• The following inactivity logout issues in the web client have been fixed:

• When inactivity logout occurred on a list or alarm list page, the logon page didn't redirect back to the list after logging back on.

• After an inactivity logout had occurred, subsequent instance of the web client would logout after 10 seconds until the browser was restarted.

• The alarm list filter dialog in the web client has been fixed to display the correct default values in the severity filter fields.

• A web client crash/lock up has been fixed relating to when a context menu displayed from script in Mimic_Load is right-clicked.

• Encoding of invalid characters in the query part of a hyperlink (e.g. mimic view name) in the web client has been improved.

• Manual alarm redirection requests from a web client are now proxied to the main server if the client is connected to the standby.

• The trend Ruler in WebX will now display the correct value when the ruler is placed before or after the last data value.

• The web client has been corrected so that lines to bounding values in raw historic trends will be drawn if the bounding value is an inserted or modified value.

ODBC Driver

• DriverODBC has been modified to reconnect in the event that the connection to a data source fails.

• The ODBC driver will return error state '08S01' if the communication layer returns a socket error code.

• A DriverODBC exception has been fixed when a control query was specified without any parameters.

Crystal Reports

• The Crystal Reports runtime components sometimes failed when multiple reports were attempted to generate at the same time. To protect against this failure, reports in ClearSCADA are now forced to use a single thread. The Thread Pool options in the server configuration dialog have been removed.

Logic

• The logic editor has been modified to allow users with read access to logic to view the program status.

• Incorrect references to 'User Defined Functions' have been removed from Logic.

• The error message reported when a Structured Text Logic program contains a built-in function call with non-constant arguments of different types has been improved.

• Fixed the ELEMENT command in logic so that the server does not crash when the located element or the string to be searched is empty.

• Fixed issue where a logic program's Trigger field would not be patched if the program was set to execute 'On Input Processed', unless the program code also referenced the trigger object or other objects affected by the move/rename. This could cause integrity check failures in cases where an instance program did get patched but the template program didn't.

• A logic crash that occurred when attempting to write an empty string to a file using WRITE_FILE has been prevented.

• Changed the logic thread to prioritize processing configuration changes over scheduled execution.

• Out of Service logic programs will not be scheduled to execute.

• Logic programs in templates will not be reported as running.

• Overrun count of disabled logic programs will not increase.

• The logic methods GetVariable and SetVariable now require Read and Write privileges respectively.

Query Processor

• Fixed the Data Table processing of queries that include clauses on indexed fields in the form "A = ? AND B = ?".

• Data Table processing in the query processor has been corrected so that an access plan of "Non-Unique By Column (Constrained)" returns the correct rows.

Templates and Instances

• A crash has been fixed which occurred in the server when the Area of Interest of the No Change alarm property was changed on abstract points in a template where instances existed with the points still in their abstract form

• Template instance repair has been fixed to include ACL, colour palette & document content to ensure database consistency when a template instance is imported and merged into a database and the referenced parent template has been changed (after the export but before the import). Previously this could result in inconsistencies between the template and instance.

• Fixed template issues related to nested instances with an overridden TemplateId field.

• Data grids in templates can no longer be converted to data tables.

Miscellaneous

• DF1 Digital points have been modified to support a bit offset of 15.

• Grid reference strings generated by the grid reference parameter object are now correctly formatted. The Configuration of these objects is now validated for correctness.

• The following memory leaks have been fixed

• Fixed a communication layer error that caused a memory leak in ViewX when connecting to older ClearSCADA 2007 R0 servers.

• Removing a metadata list or link field would leak a small amount of memory of the field name of the child "Desc" or "Link".

• Deleting a data table from the database would leak the information about the fields in that data table.

• Initial synchronization of data files when a standby connects to a main would leak the file names of the data files stored in the database.

• Updating ViewX user profiles on the Standby machine would leak a small amount of memory.

• Issues relating to the user of indirect tags that reference mimic parameters, and then embedding multiple shared instances of that mimic on another mimic have been fixed.

Using indirect tags in this way is not recommended as it can drastically affect performance.

• The Main-Standby transfer has been modified to prevent duplication of historic records on the main server if more than one standby is configured.

• The 'Links' column of the Users status page for Guest and Web users in the Server Status application has been corrected to display the correct number of links.

• An intermittent ViewX crash when users log on or off, or when servers start up or shut down has been fixed.

• The default value of the Anti-Alias setting for new mimics will be set according to the flag in the Mimics tab of the Tools/Options dialog.

• The maximum length of Float/Double fields on forms has been changed to allow the full range of values to be entered.

• ViewX would sometimes crash when editing animation expressions that reference REGISTRY settings using the flowchart editor. This problem has been fixed in this release.

• Simple schedule's next execution time will now not be reset back to the time the database was loaded following a changeover. This was then leading to the schedules actions being triggered every minute until it 'caught up' with the current time.

• Fixed a bug in the Rate of Change master station accumulator, where the initial value after an end of period reset would not be included in the calculation.

• The data, report and EOP timestamps of accumulators are now initialized to the creation time of the object, to avoid huge time intervals being used in the first calculation leading to an erroneous initial value.

• A ViewX crash that occurred when removing the same alarm twice in quick succession on a client connected to standby has been fixed.

• The simple Modbus scanner has been modified to fail with a suitable error when receiving responses containing no data.

• Fixed the handling of hyperlink fragment (e.g. mimic parameters) from Mimic.OpenInset & App.OpenWindow script functions.

• Analogue and digital point processing in the DDE driver has been corrected, where an incoming DDE value that had leading or trailing whitespace would not be correctly converted to a numeric value, resulting in a point quality of "Configuration Error".

• The Comtrol Device Master Freeport functionality in ClearSCADA drivers has been extended so that it now correctly works on 64bit Windows operating systems.

• The window width limit on text entered into the 'Accept with Comment' dialog has been removed if pre-defined comments are configured.

• The schema now shows an empty string for the "Description" if a metadata field has no description set. The "Display Name" falls back to the configured view info string, if configured in the field, or empty string if none is set.

• Filtered value maps have been corrected so that when the Reason Mask field is edited the changes are correctly applied and do not reset back to the original value.

• Fixed an issue with standard method dialog in both ViewX and web client, where if an invalid value was entered for an argument resulting in an error dialog, then a valid value entered without cancelling the method dialog, then an empty value would be sent to the server instead of the valid value.

• Prevented a spurious error that occurred when a user with an expired password attempted to log onto ViewX connected to a standby server.

• A possible server crash that occurred when a client requested a list of objects using a valid non-object derived class name has been fixed.

• A memory heap corruption (and likely crash) in ViewX / WebX when displaying the method dialog for a method where the last 'n' arguments are grouped (e.g. generate Crystal Report where parameters are configured as Boolean exclusive group) has been fixed.

• Fixed an issue with embedded alarm lists where the list's filter would sometimes not be updated if both the Filter and System properties were animated.

• The mouse pointer has been fixed to display the correct cursor when the mimic is in pan or zoom mode.

Previous Versions

• Click here for Release Notes from ClearSCADA 2007 R1.3.

• Click here for Release Notes from ClearSCADA 2007 R1.2.

• Click here for Release Notes from ClearSCADA 2007 R1.1.

• Click here for Release Notes from ClearSCADA 2007 R1.

• For Release Notes from earlier versions of the product, please refer to the Release Notes pages that can be found in the ClearSCADA Releases section of the Control Microsystems Resource Center.

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