Point of View Thin Client Configuration Part 3: Local Loopback from AutomationDirect

In this video we’ll use the project we developed in the previous video and view it from Internet explorer using a local loop back on the development PC so we can verify that all of the project files are setup correctly BEFORE we start adding in hardware drivers, NIC cards and internet stuff. The first thing we have to do is convert all the screens we created down to html files that the remote client can download and use. There’s a number of ways you can do it, but the easiest is to make sure all the screens are saved and closed and then click the Point of View button and select save all as html. Easy. By the way, if you want to see those html files, they are located in the ‘web’ folder in your project. The next step is to click on this Verify tool under the home tab. It checks to make sure everything is properly setup for the type project you are creating. Make sure you run this especially if you make any changes to the web settings because it makes sure all the html file associations are setup correctly. That’s really important. Next we’ll need a little webserver to act as our mini internet connection between the HMI application and Internet Explorer here on the local PC. Fortunately, Point of View has one included for us to use. We’ll use this NTWebServer to do our initial testing because it doesn’t require any setup and that will get us up and running faster. Please don’t use this in your final system– It’s not the server Point of View is tested with and it is not nearly as secure as the IIS server we will install in a later video. Navigate down to your point of view software install. In the BIN folder you’ll find this NTWebServer. Copy that and paste it in the ‘Web’ Subfolder of your Point of View project. Now just double click the webserver to start it. If you see this ‘Listening …’ then you are good to go. If you get a message that says the NTWebServer Failed to open a socket, it is usually because Microsoft IIS Web Server is running in the background. If so, then stop IIS and restart the NTWebServer. But it could also be that something else is running that is using TCP/IP port 80 – that’s the port we need here for the local loopback. Here’s a trick: An easy way to find out if port 80 is being used is to go to the command prompt and type netstat –a –o -b. I’m gonna hit ctrl-C to kill this command so things don’t scroll out of the screen buffer. Now if I scroll to the top of the window, I see the NTWebServer is using port 80 – exactly what we expect. If you can’t get the NTWebServer to run, then go down this list and see if anyone else is using port 80. If so then you need to stop that process to free up port 80 so our NTWebServer can function. Ok, we didn’t have that issue – we got this “Listening” message - so we are good to go! We just run the application on the local development PC – let me adjust the window a bit – and open internet explorer and point it to the local loopback project screen which is at the loop back address we provided and the name of the screen we want: 127.0.0.1/Main. You’ll see it downloading those html screens we created and just like that you now have remote control over the original app. You can change the circle color and view the time over on the server – which is really just reading the tag value on that server, of course. If we exit the remote app, it just kills the process on the client – not the server. The server app is still running. Well, that’s it. Let’s take a step back and review what we did. This example was just running internet explorer on the local server PC and bypassing all the internet hardware – including the NIC card on this PC. We did that by using a little temporary webserver called NT WebServer. Here’s a check list of what we did to get to this point: In the previous video we: Set the local loop back address to 127.0.0.1 Set TCP/IP Server to automatic Built a sample program Then in this video we took that project and we: Saved all of our screens as HTML files the client could download and use VERIFIED the project after setting all the Web Settings. Remember, anytime you make a web setting change you have to re-verify the project to get the file associations to line up. We launched the NTWebserver from the project folder so we would have a little mini network running And then opened our browser and pointed it to the server app. If yours didn’t work like this, then use this as a check list to go back and verify everything. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call AutomationDirect’s free award winning tech support during regular business hours. They will be happy to help you. And don’t forget the forums – there are lots of folks there that love to share their years of experience. Just don’t post any support questions there – AutomationDirect’s support staff doesn’t monitor the forums on a regular basis.