What Is Views Web Service?

The Views Web Service provides a general purpose interface to access data from the Canary Enterprise Historian. It is built on the “Windows Communication Foundation” (WCF) technology from Microsoft, providing several communication bindings for connection. With security enabled, access to sensitive data can be restricted to authorized users.

Protocol

Although the Views Web Service communicates with the Enterprise Historian through COM (if local) or DCOM (if remote), Microsoft WCF technology does not use DCOM, so it is “friendly” for IT, providing simplified access through networking firewalls for clients to connect.

The Views Web Service runs on a system with network connections to one or more Canary Historians. On the local computer, a client connects to an “endpoint” like net.tcp://localhost:55231/historianservice, with “localhost” being the name of the computer on the network and 55231 being the port for net.tcp - anonymous (55230 is the default port for http - anonymous). The Web Service communicates to the Canary Enterprise Historian, retrieving the data and then properly formatting the data to communicate to the client.

Web Services are designed to communicate over the internet, so the Views Web Service can connected through an internet URL allowing a client anywhere on the Internet to get Canary historical data, through a simple client application.

Clients

• Canary Admin - allows a user to browse the historical data, retrieving both raw and processed data.

• Canary Excel Add-in - uses Microsoft Excel to generate powerful reports.

• Axiom

  • Browser - a web page app designed for displaying trends or Axiom Views from the Axiom Core on web pages.

  • Desktop - a desktop client for displaying trends or Axiom Views from the Axiom Core on PCs.
    

• Canary ODBC - provides the ability to make SQL queries from the data tables of the Enterprise Historian.
  

• Historian Mirror - provides customers with the ability to transport realtime and snap shot images of data from a primary historian to a secondary historian.

• Views plugins - plugins provide extended capability to the Views Web Service such as customized tag views or batch capability.
  
  
• Asset Model - a customized view of like tags from multiple like machines or processes.

• Events - scans tags in the Historian for events meeting the conditions of an event rule.

• Custom applications - user developed applications.