Echelon SmartServer 2.2 - Manual (Page 173)

174 Using the SmartServer Web Interface
Adding Connections
You can connect data points using Web connections and L ON W ORKS connections.

Web connections bind the data points on your local SmartServer to other data points on your local
SmartServer and to the data points on remote SmartServers, OpenLNS Servers, and Web
Connection Target Servers that you have added to the LAN.

L ON W ORKS connections bind the data points in the same network database. You can create
L ON W ORKS connections in both OpenLNS managed networks and standalone networks.
Creating Web Connections
You can create Web connections to bind the data points on your local SmartServer to other data points
on your local SmartServer and to the data points on remote SmartServers, OpenLNS Servers, and Web
Connection Target Servers that you have added to the LAN. The Web connection will then keep the
data points synchronized.
Web connections are independent of L ON W ORKS domain boundaries. You do not need an OpenLNS
Server to create a Web connection between two SmartServers or between a SmartServer and a Web
Connection Target server, and SmartServers connected via Web connections do not need to be in the
same OpenLNS network database. You do need to add an OpenLNS Server to the LAN before
creating Web connections between a SmartServer and an OpenLNS Server.
You can create four types of Web connections: internal connections, peer-to-peer connections,
enterprise connections, and LNS uplink connections.

An internal connections is a connection between two data points on a single SmartServer. Internal
connections are useful for translating the data between two L
ON W ORKS devices that have
incompatible formats, as well as translating data between devices on different buses (L ON W ORKS ,
Modbus, and M-Bus).

A peer-to-peer connection is a connection between two data points on separate SmartServers.
Peer-to-peer connections provide an alternative solution to L
ON W ORKS connections over an
IP-852 channel for connecting devices over multiple networks; however, peer-to-peer bindings are
much slower (40 data point updates per second) than L
ON W ORKS IP-852 connections (1,000
updates per second). To create a peer-to-peer connection, you must first add a remote
SmartServer to the LAN. See Adding a Remote SmartServer to the LAN in Chapter 3 for how to
do this.

An LNS uplink connection is a connection between a SmartServer and an OpenLNS Server. LNS
uplink connections replace the LNS uplink feature that was used in the e3 release of the i.LON
100 server for data point connections between an i.LON server and an OpenLNS Server. To
create an LNS uplink connection, you must first add an OpenLNS Server or LNS Server to the
LAN. See Adding an OpenLNS Server to the LAN in Chapter 3 for how to do this.

An enterprise connection is a connection between a SmartServer and a Web Connection Target
Server (a Web server that can process SOAP requests). Enterprise bindings are useful for sending
a data log, an alarm log, an event scheduler log, or any user-defined file to a central enterprise
system. To use an enterprise binding, you must first add a Web Connection Target Server to the
LAN. See Adding a Web Connection Target Server to the LAN in Chapter 3 for how to do this.
Web connections can perform simple translations of scalar data points when the formats of the data
points are incompatible. For example, you can create a Web connection with the SNVT_temp_f data
point of a temperature sensor and the SNVT_temp data point of a room controller. The
SNVT_temp_f uses a floating-point type and the SNVT_temp data point uses an integral data type (a
signed long). In this case, the Web connection will translate the floating-point value stored in the
SNVT_temp_f data point to the integral value required by the SNVT_temp_p data point. The
following example demonstrates a scalar translation performed over an internal binding.