Feature to turn off auto creation of PI Tags in PI Connector for UFL

The ability to turn off auto creation of PI Tags would be extremely useful in order to keep the Data Archive organized and with the right security configurations. If we could at least configure the PI Tag parameters as point source, data security and point security, it'd be fine not to have this ability. Without both of the mentioned abilities and considering a dynamic data source, it's necessary to spend a great amount of time checking for new updates and reconfiguring the automatically created PI Points. Another possibility would be using PI Interface for UFL instead of PI Connector for UFL if the following tasks were allowed by the Interface:

• Get elements from CSV or JSON

• Communicate on a REST channel

• Support for loops for CSV or JSON

In my case, I would disable that because of two things: 1) I may receive Digital States and when the UFL Connector tries to create those tags, they end up as Strings instead of Digital States. In this case I would prefer if the UFL would write that to a log so I can check that log and then create the tags manually. 2) In some cases I would receive an integer with a float format (like 1.0, 2.0, etc) and it would create a float tag instead of Integer. In both cases you could treat using logic but that would complicate the configuration and you still may end up with things that you would not expect and I would prefer to generate an error (a log, for example) than auto creating something that is wrong. Ideally to me you would have 2 logs as well, one for regular things and one for tag creation, that way it would make it easier to review tags that were not created.

We are new PI customer implementing a system that will eventually hold the 10 years worth of data from our existing system. We are going live with a subset of data, basically only 2018 data. We will load the history on a a copy of the system and migrate the archives to production after the back filling is complete. This will allow our users to start using the system while we spend the next 6 months extracting the history from the previous system. If the UFL encounters a tag that doesn't exist and creates the tag, then we have an issue. That tag will not exist in the live system when we migrate the archives to it. It would be better to generate an error file and not create the tag. This would allow us to migrate the previously filled archives to production and add the required tags to production, and then refresh the back fill environment from a copy of production.

I also think the auto creation is not always desirable. Like Wilson Laizo said, the connector will not always create the tag with correct parameters. And in many cases you may simply get a typo in the tag name which would lead to the creation of a new unwanted tag. It just happened to me that the source files contained tags between double quotes and they were considered part of the name. So I ended up with new tags like UFL.%22Tagname%22 (%22 would be the " character encoded). Of course I just edited my INI file to read something like TAG = ["*,*,\"(*)\",*"], but the "damage" of all data processed to an undesirable tag was done.

Chris, I'm undertaking my first "real world" use of the UFL Connector and not being able to turn it off is really a hassle. We are doing a large conversion and the tag names do not always exist, or they were defined incorrectly in the first place. But there's no way to catch this, i.e. no function to check if tag exists, and no way to disable it. UFL is quite often used to bring data in from external systems, in other words, it's not necessarily connected to a source system. There's no guarantee that the tag passed is correct, or desired. It's likely a better question as to why this wasn't considered up front. Thanks, Keith

I also think this should be able to turn off. In some environments we get foreign source data automaticly converted form a service to UFL format. I don't want the connector to create tags for many of the incoming data but only for the defined ones.

Please provide different functionalities for StoreInPI() and StoreEvent(). Users should have the flexibility to not to create the tags automatically through UFL and choose StoreEvent() function. Currently both of them are doing the same. StoreinPI() can be used for both to create and store PI Tag data.