How to set programmatically AFAnalysis backfill in web api

The AF Team is adding recalculation capability to the AF SDK. What will actually happen under the hood is that the AF SDK will invoke the recalculation but the PI Analysis Service will do the work. It's a more scalable solution than having individual AF SDK clients do it. The PI Analysis Service will also take into account calculation dependency chains. This feature should be released this fall with AF Asset Analytics 2016 R2. After this feature is released, the PI Web API team will add the equivalent feature as a REST service.

The AF Team is adding recalculation capability to the AF SDK. What will actually happen under the hood is that the AF SDK will invoke the recalculation but the PI Analysis Service will do the work. It's a more scalable solution than having individual AF SDK clients do it. The PI Analysis Service will also take into account calculation dependency chains. This feature should be released this fall with AF Asset Analytics 2016 R2. After this feature is released, the PI Web API team will add the equivalent feature as a REST service.

Thank you Raymond,

It is great that these features will be available soon. But what can we do now?

In my opinion, the only way how to achieve it, is to expose low level sdk methods in web api, the problem with this approach is every call will require new connection to pisdk, fetching the same elements/templates/attributes/time rules and etc - as a consequence methods will be very slow.

Does anybody know any good example how to work with AFAnalysis? I only found couple of examples here on this forum...

Even though the PI Web API's REST services are stateless from the client's point of view, we do cache connections and some AF data in the server. When the same user returns to the server with a subsequent operation request, we take advantage of the cached information. So, we don't have to re-read the elements, templates and attributes if they are already available. When we add PI Analytics features, the same will be true. We don't expect the PI Web API itself to introduce a bottleneck.

Hello Maxim,

As mentioned by Raymond Verhoeff, the functionality you are looking for is coming, soon with the upcoming AF SDK 2016 R2 release and afterwards with a future PI Web API release. This said, I would consider your initial questions answered.

What else do you have in mind when asking for any good example how to work with Asset Analytics? Can you please ask more specific?

Hi Ray,

We have been doing a lot of backfilling lately as we add analysis to the system. Managing these backfills has proven to be a challenge and something we would like to be able to script. Based on your reply above, it sounds like the AF SDK 2016 R2 will give us a better set of tools to manage this process. When are you expecting this to be released and is there documentation available?

Thanks,

Pat

AF SDK 2016 R2 has been released. It includes an new AnalysisService object to allows your code to interact with Analytics. Documentation is on-line in our Live Library. If you need this feature in PI Web API, we are adding it now for release in April of 2017.