DSC Toolkit, does anyone use it?

[Jordan Kuehn]

^ if so, is it worth the expense to a customer? How is the overhead on the target machine? How accessible and functional is the citadel DB? The features sound great, but nothing that I can't/haven't coded myself.

[Antoine Chalons]

we use ONLY the "security" functions, we've been using them since.. well I don't know in fact, it started before I was hired in the company.

there is no cost for the customer and even if it's not perfect we've been satisfied enough to not develop our own internal solution for user management.

not using the citadel DB.

hope this helps

[viSci]

I use it primarily for Citadel and NSV events and it has worked well. The Distributed System Manager interfaces with Citadel and provides powerful historical charting capability.

For those 2 features I am not sure that it is worth the money but in my case the customer had no problem paying for it. I think it is theoretically possible to create NSV events without the DSC but I have not been able to crack that nut yet.

[asbo]

I know that we have also used it for security/authentication purposes, but I don't know much about the implementation. The security module we wrote is still used from time-to-time, likely with the same justification as Antoine.

[hooovahh]

I may be wrong but doesn't DSC also come with some kind of image library (not sure exactly what it's called) and all the neat-o xcontrols? Okay so I don't use them much but there were some pipes that have interesting bending properties.

[Phillip Brooks]

I may be wrong but doesn't DSC also come with some kind of image library (not sure exactly what it's called) and all the neat-o xcontrols? Okay so I don't use them much but there were some pipes that have interesting bending properties.

I read this on the dark side. It seems you don't need the DSC Module installed to have the cool pipes on the front panel. They appear to be Booleans...

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Creating-an-illuminated-flowpath-on-the-front-panel/m-p/1762976#M614075

Still don't know about the licensing...

[Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden]

I use it when the app warrents it.

Generally exposing an ODBC to the outside world, the DB auto logging and retrieval are the main motivators.

Upgrades have been areal pain the ...

I have DSC apps that started as BridgeVIEW and the labor involve in keeping it up to date is very costly. New version of DSC LOOK similar to the older versions but I get the impresion the developers of the newer versions had little knowlege of how the old stuff worked.

The last time I actually chose to use DSC was when I had to do logging from PLC's since that is fully auto once set-up.

DSC used to be great. Recently it feels like DSC is the red-headded step-child.

Ben

[PaulL]

I use it primarily for Citadel and NSV events and it has worked well. The Distributed System Manager interfaces with Citadel and provides powerful historical charting capability.

For those 2 features I am not sure that it is worth the money but in my case the customer had no problem paying for it. I think it is theoretically possible to create NSV events without the DSC but I have not been able to crack that nut yet.

We also use DSC for NSV events and Citadel logging and find it to be a powerful tool. The DSM and MAX interfaces are helpful (DSM much more so) but for complex data we still have to write our own methods. We have had issues with Citadel reindexing databases on occasion (which can pretty much bring the computer to a halt temporarily) but we are implementing strategies to avoid this (most notably, archiving and deleting databases every day). (It is worth noting that we are writing a lot of data at relatively high logging rates. The performance here is really pretty good.)

For the record, we have separately implemented dynamic events in RT on VxWorks (not supported by DSC) by using the "Read Variable With Timeout" method and generating a user event when we read something. Surprisingly simple.

[Jordan Kuehn]

Cool. Thanks for the insight guys. It's nice to hear from people who actually use the thing rather than the local NI guy.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

I use it when the app warrents it.

Generally exposing an ODBC to the outside world, the DB auto logging and retrieval are the main motivators.

Upgrades have been areal pain the ...

I have DSC apps that started as BridgeVIEW and the labor involve in keeping it up to date is very costly. New version of DSC LOOK similar to the older versions but I get the impresion the developers of the newer versions had little knowlege of how the old stuff worked.

The last time I actually chose to use DSC was when I had to do logging from PLC's since that is fully auto once set-up.

DSC used to be great. Recently it feels like DSC is the red-headded step-child.

Ben

I can only confirm the upgrade pains. When it was BridgeVIEW it was a predominantly LabVIEW based system with some external Logos (Lookout) components added in. Each version removed quite a bit of the LabVIEW based components and replaced them with the newest hot from the press NI technology. These replacements were supposed to be seamless, but in practice always caused various pains. And even once replaced technologies got sometimes replaced with yet another even newer technology. All in all I can't say that I can still work with the DSC toolkit anymore as just about anything is very different than it was at one time.

Also I do have developed over time my own entirely LabVIEW based data logging and monitoring system, that has many of the features of the original BridgeVIEW based system and works perfectly fine, so my need for DSC has more or less completely diminished. Additional bonus of this system is that it also ports quite nicely to RT targets like CRIO and Compact Fieldpoint. That required some initial work to make it work fine on those resource constrained systems but by now I can move an application based on that framework almost seamlessly between desktop and those RT targets. And multiple applications can communicate with each other their tag database so really distributed systems is just some extra initial configuration effort away.

[jgcode]

I have used DSC quite a bit, and I did I quick search on some of my pains I have documented over on the dark side:

• Hypertrend draws fake gap in data
  
• Enhanced RT breaks build
  
• Exe shows splash screen whilst loading
  
• Corrupt Timestamp
  
• Reg for Server Events
  
• Date Type Issue
  
• Logging Bound IO Issue
  
• Copying Control removes binding
  
• FP Security performance issues
  
• PSP LED issue
  
• Multiple Variable Editor issue
  
• Remove Process Dialog issue
  
• Writing to Citadel issue \ polyVI issue
  

Having said that, it was still a good toolkit - just seems a bit unpolished (there seems to be some inside info as to why this may be the case - I have only read what others have posted).

At the end of the day it got the job done, and there is no way I could have written app's functionality from scratch and be cost-competitive.

The extra money for a RT per PC is negligible (i.e. when you compare it to the x hrs programming cost).

I definitely look forward to seeing this toolkit get better with age (and even seeing some of its functionality in core LabVIEW).