Support of complex streams with PI Adapter for RDBMS with free attribute selection

Background:

Today we are collecting data from our AspenTech IP21 Server thorugh the PI Adapter for OPC UA and the related AspenTech OPC UA Server. This works perfectly fine for analogue data but not for data which is providing us equipment status information as enumerated strings (0=On/1=Off etc.). This is just exposed as Int32 variable by the OPC UA Server but the enumeration strings are not exposed according to the OPC UA standards so that it is not being collected by PI Adapter for OPC UA natively. To get around that, we can use the PI Adapter for RDBMS and collect the data through AspenTech SQL+ as a workaround.

Challenge:

Right now, we want to collect the data for enumerations where we can read the Int32 Value and the corresponding enumeration string. This shall be possible to get stored into a complex data stream/type as we would like to provide this information to a data analytics or reporting tool as sometimes the enumeration string might not exist and so we receive just a ">>>>>>" or "<<<<<<" from the AspeTech Server, but we still would like to read data.

Workaround:

Read data from enumeration tag using both OPC UA and RDBMS route and have two tags where one contains the information on the Int32 value and the other contains the enumeration tags. This would have negative impact on our stream count as we would need to store double amout of streams for digital tags.

Solution:

Allow to define freely configurable options how complex data can be stored using PI Adapter for RDBMS as it just allows to use specific keywords (long,lat, X,Y,Z) to define a complex stream.