OPC Data ActiveX Control Property Pages

The OPC Data ActiveX includes a set of property pages that enable you to easily configure the product to connect OPC Servers to your Visual Basic objects and forms. Below are screenshots of some of the property pages and a description of their use. Each of the properties on the property pages can also be programmatically accessed if you wish.

General Tab
This tab is used to configure important timeouts including the OPC server connection timeout, OPC command timeout, and a timeout used in monitoring the server via DCOM. You can also set defaults for the OPC group update rate and deadband (each item can also have it's own update rate and deadband that overrides the default). You can also tune the server's automatic grouping of items with the Max Items per Group setting.

OPC Server Tab
This tab is used to browse for and connect to the OPC server of your choice.

Connections Tab
On this tab you "bind" the properties of objects on your form to live OPC data.  Simply pick the object and it's associated property and click browse. Pick the item, set the update rate and deadband, and you're done, we do the rest for you.  Filters can be setup and used to narrow the scope of what properties are shown in the dialog to help with managing forms with large numbers of objects.

Events Tab
ou can use this tab to "Bind" datapoints in the OPC server for automatic updates without having to update a screen object. This can be handy for points you want to read in and calculate then display, log to a database, or otherwise utilize without displaying the data on your form. Simply create a "name" or what we like to call a "virtual object" for the binding point (the name is used in the ValueChanged event handler) and then browse, click, set update and deadband to bind the OPC data to your "virtual objects".