SIMATIC WinCC Open Architecture Forum

Hi all,
I need advice about registering WCCOAoledb provider.
What I want is to read values from ALERTS table from external VB application using ODBC driver.
In manual I found detailed explanation how to register driver and use Excel.
I have 3.15 and Win 10 64bit.
I did everything according to the instructions (regsvr32 is performed without error) but when I open ODBC manager (in both 32 and 64) I can't find WCCOLEDB in the driver list.
In my case Excel is 64 bit so I think because of that it's not suitable for testing purposes.

In the manual says
"Note that the name of the provider is WCCOAoledb OLE DB Provider and that the provider is 32 bit. Therefore, you have to add the manager to the progs file of your project under Windows 64 bit."

What means " Therefore, you have to add the manager to the progs file of your project under Windows 64 bit "?

Sorry for this beginner questions but I'm little stucked with this.

Hello,

The OleDB driver is only available as 32bit, the documentation just explains a workaround to run this process from within the 64bit PMON.

OleDB is a rather old technology, even SQL server does not support it anymore in its most recent version.

If you want to use WinCC OA data in Excel there are more modern ways to do it, take a look here:
http://www.gruber.info/2018/03/everybod ... cc-oa.html
or here:
http://www.gruber.info/2018/03/wincc-oa ... about.html

Hope that helps.

BR, Andreas
Customer Care

Hi Andreas,
thank You for Your very fast answer.
Actually we need to exchange data from Alerts table with thirth-party (non Excel) application.
If app is designed as 32 bit will it be able to use OleDb driver on 64 bit system?
Customers IT team wants to load alarms in their custom application written in VB.net.

Hello,

Thanks for the clarification. OleDB will probably work with a 32bit application, however, I cannot recommend it. It is not future proof and may be discontinued in a near WinCC OA version.

Web APIs are very common nowadays, you can consume the Webservice I have provided in the examples for Excel in most programming languages. There is great support in .Net, perl, PHP and many others. And it is platform independent. You will not need an OA installation where you want to access WinCC OA data and as common http(s) is used you will have less issues with firewalls.

I have found a small example for VB.net here:
https://forums.asp.net/t/2100314.aspx?C ... ing+VB+Net

BR, Andreas
Customer Care

Hi,
Thank You!
We will focus energy to Web API as You recommended.