3rd party historian integration

3rd Party Modules
1

I work for a software company that sells a process historian. We have a customer that is interested in us creating an integration between our product and Ignition.

I have been looking at the SDK documentation. It has been suggested by a technical support person that we may want to create our own custom Tag Historian module. Does this sound like a good approach? Are there other approaches?

If we create a custom Tag Historian module, will the user then use the normal Ignition configuration options to define what tags they want to historize and those tags will be passed to our module along with their data value changes? Or will we need to create our own tag configuration and read/subscribe to the tags the user wants to historize?

Also, if we create a custom Tag Historian module, will we need to support functions for reading historical data to the Ignition system or can it be “write-only”. If we have to support read functions are those SQL statements or some other defined interface?

Thanks,
Mark

2

I imagine the easiest way here involves no new code:

Canary Labs can pull the realtime data from Ignition via OPC UA (probably using the exposed tags feature to get the tags being used in Ignition, not to get values directly from any connected devices).

Ignition can pull history from CL via a OPC Classic HDA historical provider.

3

Hi Mark,

I think the approach suggested by Inductive Automation could work. You could also write functions in your module to query your historian and expose those functions to Ignition for use in Ignition applications.

Ignition does provide builtin software machinery for tag subscription, tag changes, user configuration, etc. that you may/probably could reuse.

Your Ignition module could get data from your historian anyway you want to do it – you could query a database or use a REST API or other way you want to do it. Perhaps you could use an OPC connection.

Best,