ReferenceApplication Producer - Interoperability Test Data Generator

Common Tasks

Working through this tutorial gives you an introductory understanding of the steps required to implement Producer role of OOI Reactive Application. SimulatorInteroperabilityTest is a sample of the Producer part of the ReferenceApplication, which is an example of Semantic-Data reactive networking based on OPC UA Part 14 Pub/Sub specification. The Producer role serves as a data generator to be used for testing purpose aimed at supporting the interoperability tests planned by the OPC Foundation. In the production environment, you may replace this library by a custom one supporting more realistic process data acquisition scenario.

Here are steps undertook to implement the Producer role in the application:

DataManagementSetup: this class has been inherited by the SimulatorDataManagementSetup class. It initializes the communication and binds the fields used to populate the messages and local resources.
IEncodingFactory and IMessageHandlerFactory: both has been implemented in the external common libraries and Producer doesn't depend on the implementation - the instance of this interfaces are localized as services using the IServiceLocator interface implementation.
IBindingFactory: has been implemented in the class DataGenerator responsible to synchronize the values of the local data repository properties and messages sent over the wire.
IConfigurationFactory: the class ProducerConfigurationFactory implements this interface to be used for configuration opening.

How to: Implement `DataManagementSetup`

The SimulatorDataManagementSetup constructor initializes all properties, which are injection points of all parts composing this role.

  public sealed class SimulatorDataManagementSetup : DataManagementSetup
  {

    public SimulatorDataManagementSetup()
    {
      IServiceLocator _serviceLocator = ServiceLocator.Current;
      string _configurationFileName = _serviceLocator.GetInstance<string>(SimulatorCompositionSettings.ConfigurationFileNameContract);
      m_ViewModel = _serviceLocator.GetInstance<SimulatorViewModel>();
      ConfigurationFactory = new ProducerConfigurationFactory(_configurationFileName);
      EncodingFactory = _serviceLocator.GetInstance<IEncodingFactory>();
      BindingFactory = m_DataGenerator = new DataGenerator();
      MessageHandlerFactory = _serviceLocator.GetInstance<IMessageHandlerFactory>();
    }

    `....`

  }

In this example, it is assumed that ServiceLocator is implemented to resolve references to any external services.

Finally the DataManagementSetup.Start() method is called to initialize the infrastructure, enable all associations and start pumping the data.

How to: Implement IBindingFactory

Implementation of this interface is a basic step to implement Producer functionality. An instance of the IBindingFactory is responsible to create objects implementing IBinding that can be used to read or generate (simulator case) from the local data repository.

This section provides hints on how to implement the Producer role responsible for:

generating stream of process data
packing the data into the messages
and sending the data over the network to all interested parties

The class DataGenerator captures implementation of a generator of testing data aimed at accomplishing interoperability tests defined by the OPC Foundation for PubSub applications. The example contains properties implemented as an instance of class ProducerBindingMonitoredValue. Modification of the ProducerBindingMonitoredValue<type>.MonitoredValue provides notification to the message handling state machine that a new value is available.

How to Guide

How to: Implement `IConfigurationFactory`

Implementation

Implementation of this interface is straightforward and based entirely on the library UAOOI.Configuration.Networking. In a typical scenario, this implementation should not be considered for further modification. The only open question is how to provide a path to the file containing the configuration of this role. In proposed solution the file path is provided by a service defined by the application entry point and localized using IServiceLocator in the class SimulatorDataManagementSetup:

  string _configurationFileName = _serviceLocator.GetInstance<string>(SimulatorCompositionSettings.ConfigurationFileNameContract);

This role uses independent configuration file ConfigurationDataProducer.xml attached to the project.

Generated Data

This Producer sends out the following Datasets:

DataSet 1 (Simple)

Parameter Name

Type

Behavior

BoolToggle

Boolean

Toggles every 3 seconds

Int32

Counts (1 per second) from 0 to 10.000 and then resets

Int32Fast

Int32

Counts (100 per second) from 0 to 10.000 and then resets

DateTime

Current time refreshed with every packet sent

DataSet 2 (AllTypes)

ParameterName

Type

Behavior

BoolToggle

Boolean

toggle every second and send one per second

Byte