RTI OPC UA/DDS Gateway

DDS and OPC UA are two of the most prominent connectivity frameworks in the Industrial Internet of Things. Traditionally, application developers and system integrators have relied on non-standard custom solutions to integrate DDS and OPC UA applications. The RTI® OPC UA/DDS Gateway leverages the OMG OPC UA/DDS Gateway standard to provide a simple generic standards-based solution that provides a transparent bridge between OPC UA and DDS applications.

Simply configure the OPC UA/DDS Gateway to forward data in the Address Space of OPC UA servers to the DDS Global Data Space or vice versa. The Gateway will automatically instantiate all the required DDS entities and OPC UA Clients to enable seamless communication with no changes required to existing OPC UA and RTI Connext® DDS applications.

Cloning Repository

To clone the repository you will need to run git clone as follows to download both the repository and its submodule dependencies:

git clone --recurse-submodule https://github.com/rticommunity/rticonnextdds-gateway-opcua.git

If you forget to clone the repository with --recurse-submodule, simply run the following command to pull all the dependencies:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Building, Testing, and Installing the RTI OPC UA/DDS Gateway

To RTI® OPC UA/DDS Gateway you will need to install the following dependencies:

• CMake > 3.7 (including Jinja2)
• Python > 3.7
• RTI Connext DDS Professional > 6.1.0

The build system requires the use of Jinja2 to generate a number of files. If you don't have Jinja2 installed in your system, we recommend you build from a Python virtual environment, with Jinja2 installed. To install Jinja2, (whether you are running from a virtual environment or your host), simply run: pip install -r <repository_dir>/resources/python/requirements.txt

Configuring Build

To configure the build environment, create a build environment and run CMake as follows:

mkdir build; cd build
cmake ..

We assume the build directory is one level into the repository directory, if you choose to build the Gateway elsewhere, please provide cmake with an appropriate path to the source tree (alternative to ..).

Path to RTI Connext DDS

Above we assume you have installed RTI Connext® DDS Professional in a default location (e.g., /opt on Linux or C:\Program Files or Windows). To provide an alternative Path,use the -DCONNEXTDDS_DIR argument. Similarly, to provide a specific architecture, provide the name of the architecture using the -DCONNEXTDDS_ARCH argument. For example:

cmake -DCONNEXTDDS_DIR=/custom/path/to/rti_connext_dds-x.y.z \
      -DCONNEXTDDS_ARCH=x64Linux4gcc7.3.0 \
      ..

Building on Windows

When building on Windows, you might need to provide CMake with an option to indicate which compiler you want to use and whether you want to build 32- or 64-bit applications and libraries. For example, the following CMake command will generate a Visual Studio compatible with Visual Studio 2017 with 64-bit support:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017" -A x64 ..

Installation Directory

To indicate an installation directory, use -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. For example:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/dir ..

Building Release or Debug Mode

You may build the RTI® OPC UA/DDS Gateway in Release or Debug mode. In either case, we recommend you build shared libraries, and therefore we preset BUILD_SHARED_LIBS to ON.

To build the Gateway in release mode, use -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE= Release or Debug. For example:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..

Summary

To build the RTI® OPC UA/DDS Gateway for a production environment, you can combine the options above as follows:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
      -DCONNEXTDDS_DIR=/path/to/rti_connext_dds-6.1.0
      -DCONNEXTDDS_ARCH=<architecture>
      -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/dir
      ..

Building the Gateway

After configuring the build, simply run cmake --build from the same directory:

cmake --build .

Alternatively, you can use the native build system of your choice, based on the CMake Generator (e.g., make for Makefiles, ninja, or Visual Studio).

Testing the Gateway

To run the RTI® OPC UA/DDS Gateway test suite, run ctest as follows:

ctest .

Installing the Gateway

After building the RTI® OPC UA/DDS Gateway, you can install it in the directory you provided via -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREDIX.

If you're using CMake 3.15 or above, you can install the Gateway as follows from within the build directory:

cmake --install .

Note that you can override the installation directory using the --prefix argument.

If you are using an earlier version of CMake, you will need to use the install target of your generator of choice (e.g., install for Makefiles or INSTALL for Visual Studio solutions). For example:

cmake --build . --target install