Edge-agent scouting design spec #423
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docs/edge-scout.md
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| The challenge with this approach is that the addresses must be known in advance, typically provided by manufacturers per device. However, these addresses can be incorrect or vary between devices. | ||
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| The goal of this new feature is to develop an MVP to explore whether this manual process can be reversed. Instead of predefining addresses, the Edge Agent would run in scout mode, actively requesting devices to provide their actual list of available addresses. This functionality would need to be implemented for each supported communication protocol, such as OPC UA, MQTT, and others. |
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This is going into the ACS docs as the documentation of the scouting feature, so it should be written as though the feature has been implemented and merged into ACS. 'The scouting feature allows this manual process to be reversed' etc.
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| ### Scout Class (New Component) | ||
| - The Scout class receives the DeviceConnection instance and scoutConfig. | ||
| - The Scout class understands the expected configuration format for each type of DeviceConnection and converts it accordingly (e.g., MQTT, OPC UA, etc.). |
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The Scout class should not be performing validation of the driver-specific part of the scout config. This will be impossible with external drivers. If validation of the scout config is needed this should be another (async) method on the Device.
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Just to note: it's important the validation method is async, as for an external driver the Edge Agent code will need to communicate with the driver to perform the validation.
| - The Scout class understands the expected configuration format for each type of DeviceConnection and converts it accordingly (e.g., MQTT, OPC UA, etc.). | ||
| - The `performScouting()` method invokes the relevant method of the DeviceConnection to perform scouting. | ||
| - Once the DeviceConnection completes scouting, `performScouting()` receives a list of discovered addresses. | ||
| - Finally, the method triggers the **scoutComplete** event with the list of discovered addresses. |
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This is not important for MVP, but eventually I think it will be helpful to re-run the scouting every N minutes, or to allow the Device to support continuous scouting with a stream of scoutComplete events. So:
- It might be better to call the event
scoutResults. - It might be easier to have the Device emit the event, and the Scout push the results up to the ConfigDB.
- You definitely want a the
scoutConfigto be in two pieces, one for the Device and one for the Scout class itself.
Design spec for edge agent scouting with implementations for MQTT and OPC UA connections.