How to Establish the Connection Between InTouch Machine Edition and Wonderware Online Historian

This blog article covers the steps recommended to establish a connection between InTouch Machine Edition HMI to Wonderware Online Historian

SITUATION

Application Versions

• InTouch Machine Edition 2014 R2 (v 8.0 Patch 2) and later
• Wonderware Online: online.wonderware.com

POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS

Infrastructure (physically dispersed applications), Smart Cities (city light  controls system), Water & Waste Water, IIoT, OEM applications, Food & Beverage, Mining

About Wonderware Online

Wonderware Online is a high-performance process historian, capable of storing huge volumes of data generated from today's industrial facilities. This data historian easily retrieves and securely delivers information to desktop or mobile devices, enabling organizations to analyze processes anywhere at any time. The Wonderware Online helps minimize capital and IT costs with its SaaS (software as a service) offering.

About InTouch Machine Edition 2014 R2 (V8.0x)

InTouch Machine Edition 2014 R2 introduces a specially designed HMI platform custom-built to embrace new technology for connectivity. With the advent of Internet of Things and Industry 4.0, not only will the number of embedded devices used for M2M data exchange increase, but demand for machine functionality will rise sharply, including demand for interoperability, the ability to exchange data with cloud-based systems, and user-friendly local configuration and maintenance. Rather than an isolated set of units, these devices can play an integral role in the overall automation system (and even supply chain). IoTView Runtime is a natural expansion of the current set of runtime editions from Wonderware InTouch, from local HMIs to SCADA systems, with unique characteristics designed to make creating these connected intelligent systems a reality.

SUMMARY

Configure a connection to a Wonderware Historian database that is hosted "in the cloud" by the Wonderware Online service.

Before you begin this task, you must have an appropriate task worksheet (e.g. Trend) open for editing. The Wonderware Historian connection setttings that are described in the steps below can be accessed only from that worksheet.

Also, you should also have appropriate credentials (i.e., user name and password) to access the Wonderware Online account(s) that you will be using.

Finally, if you are running Studio Database Gateway on another computer, you should know the host name or IP address of that computer, as well as the number of the TCP port on which the database gateway is running.

Note: InTouch Machine Edition can only save historical data to Wonderware Online. It cannot retrieve historical data from Wonderware Online.

To connect to a Wonderware Historian database hosted by Wonderware Online:

1. Create a new Wonderware Online connection in Studio Database Gateway:

a. Run Studio Database Gateway (StADOSvr.exe), if it is not already running. The Studio Database Gateway icon appears in the notificiation area, at the far right of the taskbar, to show that the program is running.

    Figure 1. Studio Database Gateway icon in the notification area 

b.Right-click the Studio Database Gateway icon, and then on the shortcut menu, click Hide. The Studio Database Gateway program window is unhidden.

    Figure 2. Studio Database Gateway

c. On the File menu, click Wonderware Online Connections. The Online Connections dialog box is displayed.

    Figure 3. Wonderware Online Connections

d. In the New Connection Name box, type the name of the connection, and then click Add. The Historian Publisher  window is displayed.

    Figure 4. Historian Publisher

e. Use Historian Publisher to log on to your Wonderware Online account and finish configuring the connection. The exact procedure to do this is beyond the scope of this documentation. Please consult the documentation for Wonderware Online instead. When you are done, the new connection is saved in the list of available connections in the Online Connections dialog box.

f. Click Close to close the Online Connections dialog box.

g. Right-click the Studio Database Gateway icon, and then on the shortcut menu, click Hide. The Studio Database Gateway program window is hidden.

You can repeat this procedure to create several different Wonderware Online connections, and then later you can specify the connection that a particular task worksheet will use. However, each instance of Studio Database Gateway can actually connect to only one Historian database at a time, so if you need to connect to multiple Historian databases, you will need to run multiple instances of Studio Database Gateway and then configure your task worksheets accordingly. Please note that all of the instances on the same computer will share the same list of Wonderware Online connections.

2. In the InTouch Machine Edition project development environment, in the header of the task worksheet, make sure Wonderware Historian is selected as the history format, and then click Historian Configuration. The Wonderware Historian dialog box is displayed.

3. In the Connection Type list, select Wonderware Online (Cloud). The settings for the selected connection type are displayed.

     Figure 5. Connection settings for Wonderware Online

4. In the Connection Name box, type the name of a connection that you previously created and saved in Studio Database Gateway. 

5. In the Prefix box, type a prefix that will be added to the tags saved in the Historian database in order to keep them grouped together. For example, if you are configuring the connection for Trend worksheet TREND001, you could make that the prefix as well. This setting is optional, but if you do not specify a prefix, the tags will be not be sorted together in the database and therefore might be difficult to find. Also, you can configure a tag name in curly brackets (e.g., {MyPrefix}) in order to change the value of this setting during run time. See "Reload" below.

6. If you want to store historical data when the connection is unavailable and then forward the stored data when the connection is reestablished, select Enable store and forward. The historical data are saved in your project folder (on the project runtime server). Please note that this can consume a large amount of drive space if the connection is unavailable for a long time.

7. In the Run-time group, in the Status box, type the name of a project tag (Integer type) that will receive codes describing the status of the connection during run time. This setting is optional.

8. In the Run-time group, in the Reload box, type the name of a project tag that will trigger reloads of the connection settings. When the value of this tag changes, the connection settings above will be reloaded. For those settings, you can configure tag names in curly brackets (e.g., {MyServer}) in order to change the values of those settings during run time. The connection to the Historian database is updated only when the settings are reloaded, and the settings are reloaded only when the value of the specified tag changes. This is to make sure that all of the settings are reloaded together rather than one at a time.

9. In the Gateway group, in the Host and Port boxes, type the host name or IP address and port number of the database gateway that your project will use. The default settings are for the database gateway running on localhost — that is, on the same computer or device as the project runtime.

10. Click OK to save the settings and close the dialog box.

Please note that if your project is configured to use a database gateway on another computer, you must make sure that database gateway is running before you try to run your project on its target device. If the database gateway is not running, your project will not be able to use it to connect to the specified database. For more information, see help file: Manually running Studio Database Gateway. In contrast, if your project is configured to use the database gateway on localhost, you do not need to do anything. When you run your project, it in turn will automatically run the database gateway.