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Status Declined
Product PI Connectors
Created by Guest
Created on Aug 18, 2022

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

Ability to turn off auto creation of PI tags - When data is sent via REST to a PI Connector for UFL service ,currently it looks for a PI Tag in the PI Server and if the PI Tag does not exist it creates a new PI Tag. It would be good if we could turn off the feature if not required as in our case we have a naming convention for PI Tags and we create the tag names in advance so would not like to allow for the auto creation of PI Tags.
  • ADMIN RESPONSE
    Aug 18, 2022
    Thank you for your input. We are continuing to support PI Connector for UFL with stability and security releases. However, for feature enhancements, we are starting to develop the PI Adapter for Structured Data Files and encourage you to go to the PI Adapters forum to share your use cases.
  • Attach files
  • Guest
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    Aug 18, 2022
    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.
  • Guest
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    Aug 18, 2022
    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.
  • Guest
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    Aug 18, 2022
    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.
  • Guest
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    Aug 18, 2022
    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
  • Guest
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    Aug 18, 2022
    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.
  • Guest
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    Aug 18, 2022
    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.