Day 5 Conclusion

Congratulations! You have followed all of the steps of the Developer Driver Tutorial! In today's lesson you created a point discover parameters structure, a point discovery leaf, a point discover request, a point discover response, and a point discovery preferences structure. In Java code, you made some associations between these and your driver's point-device-extension. By doing this, your driver now supports point discovery.

To discover data points that are in a device:

Run a station and view your network's Point Manager
- Run a station that has your driver's network component under the drivers folder and that has at least one of your driver's device components under your driver's network component.
- Open a Workbench.
- Connect to your station.
- Double click the station.
- Expand the network in the navigation tree.
- Expand the device in the navigation tree that is under your network.
- In the navigation tree, double click the Points folder that is under the device.
  NOTE: The Points folder is your driver's point-device-extension.
- Verify that the Point Manager appears.
- You should see a Discover button at the bottom of the Point Manager.

Discover the points on your field-bus.

Click the Discover button.
Provided that you did not set the default value of the doNotAskAgain property on BYourDriverPointDiscoveryPreferences to true then you should see a window appear with a property-sheet-like representation of BYourDriverPointDiscoveryPreferences.
Click Ok.
The discovery should now be occurring in the station.

The job progress bar at the top of the Point Manager should provide visual feedback about the completion status of the discovery process.

In your station, the driver will loop through all possible combinations of BYourDriverPointDiscoverParams from the min to max that was specified on the window that popped up after you clicked the Discover button (or if you configured the default for the doNotAskAgain property to be True then the driver will loop automatically from the min to the max.

If all went well then you should see one or more rows in the top half of the Point Manager. This area of the Point Manager is called the discover pane. The columns in the discover pane should correspond to the properties that are declared with the MGR_INCLUDE facet on the read parameters, write parameters, and point id structures that you defined on BYourDriverPointDiscoveryLeaf.

Add one or more driver control point components to your network.
- Select a row in the discover pane and click the Add button.
- A window should appear that shows you the driver control point and its initial values that are about to be added to the database. You will be allowed to modify any data values that you desire. However, the defaults should be exactly as you declared in your discovery response's getDiscoveryChildren method.
- Click Ok.
- A Niagara AX control point, with an fully configured instance of your driver's proxy extension, should appear under your device's "Points" folder in your station.
  The driver should automatically start polling the control point and updating the control point's out value.