Walk-through ReferenceApplication

Introduction

The topics contained in the document Getting Started Tutorial are intended to give you quick exposure to the OOI Reactive Application network-based data exchange programming experience. Working through this tutorial gives you an introductory understanding of the steps required to customize existing OOI Reactive Application.

This project is aimed at implementation of an example of the OOI Reactive Application supporting producer and consumer roles simultaneously. The purpose of the ReferenceApplication is to demonstrate the concepts and architecture of the reactive networking application implementation, rather than to necessarily provide a realistic scenario for its use. For more extensive examples, see the Semantic-Data Processing Architecture.

The ReferenceApplication hosts parts offering Producer and Consumer functionality. Both roles are implemented as independent threads that have a common graphical user interface (GUI) for diagnostic and configuration purpose.

The Producer sends messages containing the fields defined in the configuration file using UDP communication stack. The values are simulated. The Consumer is configured to receive these messages from the UDP protocol stack. The Consumerto correctly decode the messages must have configuration defining the same set of fields. The data is encoded using Variant encoding.

The detailed description of the Consumer is covered by the document ReferenceApplication Consumer - Data Logger. The detailed description of the Producer is covered by the document ReferenceApplication Producer - Interoperability Test Data Generator.

Each role uses independent configuration file. The detailed description of the configuration maintenance is captured in the document UA Data Networking Configuration.

Architecture

The diagram below presents main parts making up the ReferenceApplication - an example application compliant with the Object Oriented Internet concept.

ReferenceApplication: Reactive Networking of Semantic-Data Library WPF GUI layer - it exposes the startup entry point to the runtime environment.
DataLogger: is an example of the Consumer part of the ReferenceApplication.
SimulatorInteroperabilityTest: Producer implementation of a data generator to be used for testing purpose.
UDPMessageHandler: proprietary UDP IMessageHandlerFactory implementation.
Encoding: IEncodingFactory functionality implementation limited to encoding simple data types for the testing purpose only.
ReferenceApplication.Core: this library provides an implementation of a core functionality required by the ReferenceApplication and all its components that are helpful in writing well-structured and maintainable applications.
SemanticData: Reactive Networking of Semantic-Data Library library based on OPC UA Part 14 Pub/Sub.

How to: Get Started

Application Installation

The application is located on the GitHub at OPC-UA-OOI and maintained as the project Networking.ReferenceApplication of the solution UAObjectOrientedInternet.sln.

The current binary release containing ready to use application is available on the repository Releases page. Download and run the downloaded .exe file to unzip the content to selected folder. Now you may run the application file UAOOI.Networking.ReferenceApplication.exe to get started.

Version History

Detailed description is available in file ReadMe.txt

Prerequisites

By design, thi library depends on a logger functionality implementing the interface


UAOOI.Common.Infrastructure.Diagnostic.ITraceSource

defined in the UAOOI.Common.Infrastructure package. It is used to trace the behavior of libraries at run-time. To get an instance implementing this interface the CommonServiceLocator is used. The functionality required by the CommonServiceLocator has to be provided by the hosting application. Usually, it is provided by the composition container that is built at the application bootstrap stage. To get more visit this library home page Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation at GitHub.

If the CommonServiceLocator is not available a default logger (do nothing) is used.

Troubleshooting

For the diagnostic purpose, the application supports network transfer tracing that provides access to information about method invocations and network traffic generated by the application. This feature is useful for debugging applications under development as well as for analyzing deployed applications. The output provided by network tracing is customizable to support different usage scenarios at development time and in the production environment. Traces are to publish specific messages that are generated during application execution. To learn more about a configuration of the tracing visit the documentation at Network Tracing in the .NET Framework.

The log file UANetworkingReferenceApplication.log captures output messages from some public methods of the Socket, TcpListener, TcpClient, and Dns classes. To find the log file location click the Actions.Open Configuration folder menu entry.