Can't get Factory Link 6.6 to log to Access Database

J

Thread Starter

John Midgley

Having tried for weeks on end with little or no help from technical support, I turn to you guys. I can log to MSAccess but it is logging anywhere between 2000 and 15,000 before I stop it. The trigger seems to be fine and all the panels seem to set up as per the manuals state. Eventually I would like to read from the Access database back to tags in my application. Has anybody logged to MSAccess97 or MSAccess2000 successfully? I have also battled using Dbase4 but no joy there either....
help!
 
> Having tried for weeks on end with little or no help from technical support, I turn to you guys. I can log to MSAccess but it is logging anywhere between 2000 and 15,000 before I stop it. ...<

It is not clear what the above statement means - perhaps you could clarify it.
 
J
John,

FactoryLink logs to Access through ODBC. I always define a System DSN for this. Just to get things going I suggest you blow away the security issues and run your Flink application from an account with Admin priviledges. It is easy to overwhelm Access, so don't get "trigger" happy until you see it work reliably, i.e., start with a 10 second or so period between writes. You might also want to restore the test application, I think it is in %FLINK%/mps. This already works with dBase. You can verify that your ODBC setup is correct by modifying it to work the ODBC historian.

The test application also has an example of using the browser to read back the data. This is a horribly complicated task to configure. You can use their PowerSQL ($$$) option or PowerVB routines that will do the same thing without the mess.


Jay Kirsch
[email protected]

 
J

John Midgley

Dear Jay,
I have set ODBC up correctly with a system DSN. I have started a new application just to see if the logging will work. It logs to the file but it logs more than one. I have set it up to log one record and used the Schema to create the table (this works). I have tried it with a message tag type, an analogue tag type and a digital tag type but they all log more than one. The trigger is just a button, for this I have tried the 'Momentary On' type and even the 'Toggle' type but I still get more than one entry until I stop the application. When you set up the Schema you can restrict the number of records, I have tried restricting this to five records, but it still logs too many. What are the admin privileges? are these set in the ODBC or Factory Link?
I begin to wonder if Factory Link is not compatible with Access2000 as I have had no luck reading from Access2000 using Database Browser either. Sometimes I wish it was as easy as InTouch.

Thanks Jay
Best Regards John
 
J
John,

The limit on the number of records logged only applies to dBase IV historian and only works if you have not already exceeded your specified limit. This is, you cannot lower the limit after the dbase table has been populated to its previous limit.

I do not use Access for data logging for this and a few other reasons: it gets very slow when the tables get large and it cannot be automatically maintained. You can delete records from Access, but that will not improve the performance of a large table.

Maybe you could use the desktop version of
SQLServer for your application. This will avoid the problems I mentioned with Access. You can link Access to the SQLServer tables to do your reporting stuff.

Jay Kirsch
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
 
R

Robert Nickel

You might also consider MySQL. The setup is straightforward and it eats Access files quite handily. Speed wise, it's as good as any. It's free and it has great odbc support.

--Robert Nickel,
City of Fresno, Water
 
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