Wonderware ArchestrA displaying "Initializing" quality for OPC Connection instead of "Bad" quality

In legacy OPC DA applications (servers and clients), the OPC Specification defined that Bad OPC Quality be passed to OPC DA Clients as the OPC status E_FAIL (0X80004005).

With OPC DA Specification 2.05, Bad OPC Quality for items is defined as S_FALSE (0x00000001).

By default, TOP Server is configured to be fully OPC Compliant, so TOP Server will send S_FALSE OPC Quality for items with Bad Quality.  For OPC DA Clients that still support E_FAIL only, S_FALSE cannot be processed properly.

To be compatible with the widest range of OPC DA Client applications, TOP Server provides the ability to enable or disable certain OPC DA Compliance settings.

In this case, when Wonderware ArchestrA application is displaying an OPC Quality of "Initializing" when expected to display an OPC Quality of "Bad", do the following in TOP Server:

1. In the TOP Server Configuration, go to File ⇒ Project Properties.
2. Select the OPC DA Compliance settings.
3. If enabled, disable the setting labeled "Perform the following operations in agreement with the OPC-DA 3.0 specification."
4. Then disable the setting labeled "Data change callback is passed item-level error=S_FALSE for items with bad quality."

This will result in the OPC Quality for items to display correctly in Wonderware ArchestrA.

As an alternative, Wonderware has created a hotfix for this behavior that allows ArchestrA to correctly process a Bad Quality indicator of S_FALSE for items with Bad Quality.  You may contact Wonderware Technical Support and request Change Request/Hotfix # L00119545.

Wonderware Customer First Support Members - custfirstsupport@wonderware.com

Wonderware Support (No Support Agreement) - wwsupport@invensys.com