[General] Section

The General section consists of 4 lines:

[General]
Name=name
Description= description
DriverName= driver name
DriverInst="a special string"

The name and the description are not currently used by Plant SCADA. Plant SCADA uses the driver name to load the correct driver for accessing the external data source. This driver might be one that is part of the Plant SCADA installation, or it might be a customized driver (including a driver that you have written yourself), for accessing a particular data source (which could be a protocol, type of hardware, server or file type). The driver needs to be an OLE DB-compliant driver.

The special string allows extra information to be passed to the driver. It is added to the connection string (in Plant SCADA Studio). So the connection string can be used for information that is likely to change often, and this special string can be used for more persistent information (such as the comma "," delimiter for a .CSV file). The main use of this string is as a delimiter for an input file. To specify that a comma "," is used by an input file as the delimiter, the following syntax would be used:

DriverInst="delimiter=,"