Advanced OPC Driver - Block Controls

[tfranklin]

It would be really neat to see the OPC server object have a checkbox for something like Block Controls or Ignore Writes.  The use case for this is when there's a production system and a second system (QA or Dev) pointed to the same OPC server.  You can have the OPC server object in QA configured to ignore writes that way all other features continue to function without impeding with production data.  Often times we have customers who want to see values updating in development or QA to replicate load and other things.

We could use server denied permissions and block control, but we still want logic and ST to continue to work so I'm not sure there's a workaround for it.

[BevanWeiss]

You could use the Server ViewX configured permissions.  There's three settings here, which I haven't really used much, so not sure entirely how they operate:

• ViewX user denied permissions
• WebX/Operator ViewX user denied permissions
• Standard pick menu denied permissions

This would obviously apply across all objects in the whole database, which may not be what you really want.

To get finer grained, you'd likely just need to remove Control security permissions from everyone.  That would still allow the Logic/ST to perform the actions, since it executes under the System permission level.

[tfranklin]

Going with ViewX or server denied permissions gets us most of the way there, but the issue still exists for things like logic where they're doing things like writing totals back to a PLC or doing GQ writes. We'd want to seize all controls from writing out to a device, whether from a script or server side logic, but still allow controls for internal items.

Each of the items you noted has a use case, but none of them are simply a "ignore controls sent via OPC".  It's either controls for specific users, controls for ViewX as a whole which affects internal tags, or just hiding controls from pick menus. 

[sbeadle]

Thank you.