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Channels

The library uses abstract communication channels to send and receive bytes "over the wire". The following channel types are supported:

• TCP client / server
• TLS client / server
• UDP
• Serial

The manager that you created previously is now ready to have some channels bound to it. Adding a channel to the manager does not make it attempt to open the channel immediately. If it's a TCP socket or serial port it won't try to open until you bind at least one outstation or master session and enable it. Here's an example of how you go about adding a TCP client. Assume we have a DNP3Manager called 'manager':

auto channel = manager.AddTCPClient(
  // alias used in log messages
  "tcpclient",
  // bitfield used to filter what gets logged
  levels::NORMAL | levels::ALL_APP_COMMS,
  // determines how connections will be retried
  ChannelRetry::Default(),
  // List of endpoints or DNS host names to cycle through
  { IPEndpoint("127.0.0.1", 20000) },
  // IP address of the local ethernet adapter (0.0.0.0 == any adapter)
  "0.0.0.0",
  // optional listener interface for monitoring the channel
  PrintingChannelListener::Create(),
);

There is a Add<channel type> method on DNP3Manager for each channel type. Refer to the C++ doxygen documentation for details.

Exponential back-off

The ChannelRetry configuration specifies two timing parameters for the minimum and maximum connection retry times using an exponential back-off strategy. If you don't want exponential back-off, just set the minimum and maximum to the same value for a consistent delay. Exponential back-off really only makes sense for initiating TCP connections.

For instance if you set the minimum to TimeDuration::Seconds(3) and the maximum to TimeDuration::Seconds(40) a series of failed connections would have the following time gaps between attempts.

3, 6, 12, 24, 40, 40, .....

Monitoring channels

Most of the time your communication channel is open and passing dnp3 traffic back and forth. Sometimes, however, things can go wrong with your network or you have mis-configured your connection. when creating your channel, you can pass in a shared_ptr<IChannelListener> to monitor the state of channel. This interface provides a method returning an enumeration of the states of the channel:

enum class ChannelState : uint8_t
{
    /// offline and idle
    CLOSED = 0,
    /// trying to open
    OPENING = 1,
    /// open
    OPEN = 2,
    /// stopped and will never do anything again
    SHUTDOWN = 3
};

Cleaning up

Channels and all the sessions bound to them are automatically cleaned up when the DNP3Manager goes out of scope (or is deleted if allocated dynamically). You can manually remove a channel without having to stop every master or outstation bound to it by calling IChannel::Shutdown().

// permanently shutdown the channel
channel->Shutdown();

Calls to Shutdown() are idempotent. The resources for the underlying channel will be freed when you drop the reference to the shared_ptr<IChannel>.