Engineering Tip

Many companies today use an intranet to provide access to all company data.  This is also true for data regarding the process and products that they produce.  This document describes a technique for displaying tag data inside a web page without the use of WebClient.

This should work on any Win95/Win98/WinNT computer.  The Win95 computer will need the latest Winsock 2.0 and DCOM patches from Microsoft before attempting.

The client computer will also need the FactoryLink Tag ActiveX Control.  It is found on the install CD:  \win32i\flocx\flocx.exe  Install this file on the client by executing it on the client computer.

The server computer will need some security and application changes.  You must have administrator privileges to make the security changes.
    1.  Add user account for the client that is the same as the client network login user name and password
    2.  Setup Windows NT Distributed COM Configuration as specified in the Configuration Guide, OLE Automation Server chapter.
    3.  Add the FLOLE task to the shared domain as described in the OLE Automation Server chapter.

The FLOLE task provides the DCOM connectivity for all tags in that domain.  This task is part of the base product and does not require additional licenses.

Click here to see an example HTML file. You can save this HTML file to your local computer and edit it to match your needs.

Be careful wit tag choice.  Note that one of the example tags allows a user to start and stop a task from a web page!  You may want to configure yours for view-only, there is no real security with this feature beyond the scripting that you use.