OPC UA Client Development

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OPC Unified Architecture

OPC UA Client Development Overview

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Advosol Inc.
PO Box 92948
Austin, TX 78709, USA
512 557 4040
www.advosol.com
sales@advosol.com

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The development of OPC UA client applications is considerably more complex than clients for earlier OPC specifications.

The client may have to support multiple communications stacks in order to be able to access many different OPC UA servers.
A secure server access session has to be established
The capabilities and its data structure need to be determined and the client needs to be able to work with differently structures servers.

Some if the complicating elements can be handled in components but this simplifies on the software development. The product documentation, testing and the customer support has to cover all aspects.

The UA server network database allows complex structures and gives the server developer the possibility to map the device data in many different ways into the server database. Browsing the OPC UA server to find the proper items and item attributes can be a challenge. The network structure cannot be easily put into a two dimensional presentation. The OPC UA server can define Views with a subset of the network structure but such Views will be different in each server. More training and support will be required for client application configurators.

There appears to be a trend to use OPC UA only as a replacement of the classic OPC DA.
Such UA servers have a simple node structure that reflects the hierarchical organization of OPC DA servers.
DA only UA clients ignore node references that go beyond the hierarchical structure.
With these restrictions the UA server and client development is significantly simplified and what’s often the biggest concern, the DCOM communication, is eliminated.
Advosol offers the uaPLUS toolkit for UA servers with DA functionality. This toolkit uses the same customization plug-in .NET assembly as the DANSrv toolkit for classic OPC DA servers. OPC UA and OPC DA servers can be created with a single development effort.
For client developers Advosol offers the UA Option for OPCDA.NET. Applications developed for classic OPC DA can access UA servers through the same API.