We have been using the PI Adapter for OPC UA in its current version to collect data from IP21 OPC UA Server during a lighthouse project. However, the configuration was a bit cumbersome since the OPC UA Server of AspenTech uses an opaque mechanism which is using a base64 encoded hexadecimal number being compiled of multiple fields of the IP21 tag configuration for the ItemID rather something usable. This brings the problem that the PI Adapter will be using the base64 encoded string as stream/tag name by default. This makes the stream/tag name unreadable. To get around this, we created an Excel table which has the Tagname and the specific attributes and then translates it to the corresponding base64 string. So automatic discovery of the PI Adapter is not useful right now and data selection is a manual but doable process if using this approach since the data selection JSON file needs to be manually built.
A solution would be to let the PI Adapter for OPC UA do an initial browse of items and then do a rebrowse to identify the tag/stream names during the discovery process.
Also, the PI Adapter for OPC UA can recover historical data perfectly well from the IP21 historian server with a very good performance. For this, it is recommended to set up a second Adapter component which just does the historical data recovery.
We did notice, that the Client Settings also need to be amended ("ReadBlockSize" parameter was set to 1, default setting was 1000) since the IP21 UA Server does not like bulk requests during initialization of a connection.
If the limitation of the data discovery could be overcome and the PI Adapter for OPC UA would just get implemented these small changes with the re-browse during data discovery and maybe a section about IP21 specific things in the documentation, this can be a very good option without having a native PI Adapter for IP21.
Only requirement is the availability of the AspenTech IP21 OPC UA Server.
It would be also useful to add a section in the PI Adapter documentation about the specific settings to read data from AspenTech IP21 OPC UA Server.
