The Comm tab of the Project Explorer organizes the worksheets that establish communication with another device or software using available protocols.
Figure 1. Comm tab of
the Project Explorer
The folders on the Comm tab are described on the
following pages.
- Drivers contains
the
Driver worksheets used to
configure a communication interface (or interfaces) between the
project and remote equipment (such as a PLC or transmitters).
A communication driver is a .DLL file that contains specific information about the remote equipment and implements the communication protocol.
- OPC contains the OPC worksheets used to configure communications between your project (which acts as an OPC client) and any other device that implements the classic OPC standard.
- OPC UA contains the OPC UA worksheets that are used to connect to OPC Servers via the new OPC Unified Architecture protocol.
- OPC .Net contains the OPC .Net worksheets that are used to connect to OPC Servers via the new OPC .NET 3.0 protocol.
- TCP/IP contains
the
TCP/IP worksheets used to
configure TCP/IP Client interfaces for other IWS stations.
IWS TCP/IP Client and Server modules enable two or more projects to keep their databases synchronized using the TCP/IP protocol.
- DDE contains the
DDE worksheets used to
configure a DDE Client for a DDE Server application (such as
Microsoft Excel or any other Windows program that supports this
interface).
DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) is a protocol that enables dynamic data exchange between Windows applications. A DDE conversation is an interaction between server and client programs. IWS provides interfaces that run as clients or as servers.