Requirements and Installation

Requirements

Following requirements must be matched to use the WinCC OA Desktop UI:

  • The WinCC OA Desktop UI is part of the base package of WinCC OA
  • Valid licenses for the WinCC OA UI are required to use the WinCC OA Desktop UI
    Important: For the WinCC OA Licensing of the Desktop UI on Linux platforms, install the CodeMeter rpm package located in the data/clsetup directory. After you connect to the server, you can download the package.
  • A running WinCC OA HTTP Server started with the "webclient_http.ctl" CTRL script

Installation

  • To install the Desktop UI you need to install the Desktop UI installation package. These packages can either be distributed manually to your client device or via the WinCC OA HTTP server.
  • To install the required HTTP server you just add a new CTRL manager to your project, add "webclient_http.ctl" as parameter to it and start the manager. By default your HTTP server is now reachable under the IP or host name (DNS or hosts file entry required) and the default ports under Windows are 80 (no SSL) or 443 (SSL). However, ports < 1024 are not available for non-root users on Linux systems. Therefore, the ports 8080 (no SSL) and 8079 (SSL) are used by default when a non-root user starts the manager. For more details on setting up your HTTP server please refer to the chapter HTTP Server.
    Tip: Please note that by default only the HTTPS port can be used for the Desktop UI. To also use the unencrypted HTTP port the config entry [httpServer] strictTransportSecurityMaxAge must be set to 0.
  • In order to use the HTTP server authentication, add the [webClient] httpAuth=1 config entry. Open the project selection of the desktop UI via Start menu -> WinCC OA Desktop UI 3.18x64 and specify a user in the panel "Projects". If a user was specified, a login dialog is not shown. If a user is not specified, a login dialog is shown.
Figure 1. Desktop UI - Edit connection - specify Username for httpAuthentication (optional)

  • You can change the images shown for the Desktop UI. The images can be changed in the directory wincc_oa_path/DesktopUI/<version>/data/webClient. The following figure shows the images that can be changed. Replace the images by your own images.

Figure 2. Images that can be changed
Figure 3. Project selection and customer-specific images

Manual distribution

The required package for each supported desktop operating system can be found inside of your regular WinCC OA installation under /data/clsetup/. Select the package for your client operating system and copy the package to your client device. Afterwards just install the package as you install the regular WinCC OA on your devices.

HTTP server distribution

Just connect with your client device to the WinCC OA server project via web browser and a corresponding download page for the Desktop UI is opened. Select the download package matching your clients operating system and install the downloaded package.

Note: The web server needs to be running for downloading the Desktop UI as well as for using the Desktop UI.

RDP (Remote desktop protocol) support

As WinCC OA is platform agnostic (see the number of supported operating systems on Software requirements), the same operations can be performed with the Desktop UI via Remote Desktop as if they would be running natively. For technical details regarding RDP directly please refer to the respective OS vendors.