PI Web API 2016 R2 Release Notes

Application Version 1.8.0

2016 © OSIsoft, LLC. All rights reserved
Table of Contents

Overview ................................................................................................................... 1
Fixes and Enhancements ........................................................................................ 1
Fixes .................................................................................................................... 1
Enhancements..................................................................................................... 2
Known Issues ........................................................................................................... 3
Setup ......................................................................................................................... 3
Operating Systems .............................................................................................. 3
Server Platforms .................................................................................................. 4
Distribution Kit Files ............................................................................................. 4
Installation and Upgrade ..................................................................................... 4
Uninstalling PI Web API ...................................................................................... 5
Documentation Overview ........................................................................................ 5
Technical Support and Resources ........................................................................ 6
 Overview
The PI Web API is a RESTful service in the PI Developer Technologies suite, designed to
provide cross-platform web and mobile programmatic interfaces to the PI System. The PI
Web API presently contains basic functionality needed to retrieve and manipulate time series
data from the PI Data Archive, Asset and Event Frame data from the PI Asset Framework,
and to index and search on objects within the PI System.
The PI Web API belongs to the OSIsoft PI Developer Technologies family of products, which
is designed to support the implementation of custom applications on top of the PI System, as
well as the integration of PI System data with other applications and business systems such as
Microsoft Office or SQL Server, Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs), reporting and
analytics platforms, web portals, geospatial and maintenance systems, just to name a few.
The PI Developer Technologies cover a wide range of use cases in various environments,
programming languages, operating systems and infrastructures.

Community Technology Previews (CTP)

This release includes the following CTP releases for your evaluation.
 Channel service
 Shared Index configuration for the PI Web API Indexed Search
 Support for FIPS
OSIsoft welcomes your feedback. We may decide not to formally release these services and
withdraw the functionality from future releases.
For more information on other products in the PI Developer Technologies family and details
on the licensing specific to these products, please contact your account manager.

Fixes and Enhancements

Fixes

This section lists items that were resolved or added in this release of PI Web API.
Work Item Description
66552 Core Services: “TypeQualifier” property is
missing when restoring a PI point with digital set
to a dynamic Attribute.
68518 Core Services: System.DBNull value type is not
supported.
85222 Core Services: Channel connects successfully
but doesn’t send any message back.

This section lists items that were resolved or added in this release of PI Web API Indexed
Search.

PI Web API 2016 R2 Release Notes Template Version 2.5 Page 1

 Work Item Description
90634 PI Data Archive Crawls are now much quicker
for pointtype attributes.
60856 Improved scheduling of multiple simultaneous
Crawls.
72414 PI Tags are now shown in search results.
108170 Search source names can now support special
characters.
112399 Fixed an issue where crawls are stuck in
Finalize state indefinitely.
83008 Resolved a problem where paths are not
generated properly for an AF element, when a
reference is added on database root.

Enhancements

PI Web API 2016 R2 introduces the following enhancements:

 Supports read, create, update and delete operations for Security Identities
 Supports read, create, update and delete operations for Security Mappings
 Supports read, create, update and delete operations for Security Entries
 Supports read, create, update and delete operations for Annotations on Event Frames
 Permits management of Attribute Traits
 Supports the addition of an existing Element as a child to another Element
 Supports the provision of time zone information as a query parameter for Stream and
StreamSet resources
 Supports Gzip compression for inbound data

PI Web API Indexed Search Plug-in introduces the following enhancements:

 Support for FIPS (CTP)
 Scheduling of simultaneous crawls has been improved: concurrent crawls are now
permitted up to the configured limit of MaxConcurrentCrawlers
 WebId is added to the search source results
 Improved incremental crawl times for PI Data Archive
 "WebID" is now spelled "WebId" in search results for consistency with the rest of PI
Web API
 General bug fixes, security enhancements, appearance, and performance improvements

PI Web API 2016 R2 Release Notes Page 2

 Known Issues
This section lists problems and enhancements that have been deferred until a future release.

Work Item Description

N/A Channel service (CTP) doesn’t work on Windows Server 2008 R2 or earlier
platform. This is a known issue that .NET implementation of Web Sockets is
only available on Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 and above. No work
item is assigned to address this issue. PI Web API will phase out the support
of Windows Server 2008 R2 in the near future.
N/A Security settings of “Basic” or “Anonymous” prevent crawler execution. There
is a known issue with any security setting other than “Kerberos” creating
problems with the PI Web API Indexed Search crawler from executing.
Workaround is to use “Kerberos” security settings. No work item is assigned to
address this issue.
29132 PI AF server and database security is not factored into element level security.
When security is calculated, only element security is considered. This is only a
problem if a user is given explicit “DENY-READ” on a PI AF server or
database but has “ALLOW-READ” on an AF element, or if the user is an
Administrator but has no explicit read privileges on an AF element.
42700 Numerous PI Mappings may prevent access controls from being respected. If
several hundred PI Mappings exist for a single PI System, the Indexed Search
service may not be able to calculate the correct access controls. A
straightforward workaround is to map to an Active Directory group rather than
to individual accounts.
53055 Identity mapping changed on a PI System triggers a full crawl of all the
databases on that PI System. If a security mapping on a PI System changes, a
full crawl is triggered on all the databases on that PI System. This behavior
may be disabled by adding a registry entry:
In the InstallationConfig.json file located inside the installation folder, set the
property “AutoCrawlRebuild” value to false.
91225 Error stating, "When getting match info for AF attribute: Index was outside the
bounds of the array" seen when querying in PI Web API Indexed Search and
search index is in finalizing step. Workaround is to resubmit query after index
is finalized.

Setup

Operating Systems

The preferred, supported deployment platforms are Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows
Server 2012.
Windows Server 2008 R2 (Full Desktop Installation only) may also be used; however, use of
Windows Server 2008 R2 is discouraged, as planned enhancements to PI Web API will
require functionality that is only available in later versions of Windows.
Microsoft’s client operating systems, Windows 10 (64-bit only) may be used in a limited
capacity for development and testing purposes only. Please make sure that two entries
“RegisteredOwner” and “RegisteredOrganization” exist under the registry key

PI Web API 2016 R2 Release Notes Page 3

 “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion”. If not, add those two entries with empty string values.
Earlier versions of Windows and non-x64 versions of Windows are not supported.

Server Platforms

 PI Data Archive 3.4.380 (released in 2009) or later. PI Data Archive 3.4.390

(2012) or later is recommended.
 PI Asset Framework 2.1 (released in 2009) or later. PI Asset Framework 2.7
(2015) or later is recommended.
Not all features, bug fixes and performance enhancements may be available with older PI Data
Archive or PI AF servers.

Distribution Kit Files

The installer is released as a self-extracting distribution kit that contains:

 Installation files for .NET Framework 4.6.
 Installation files for PI AF Client 2016 R2 (x64), which includes the AF
client installer, and installers for its prerequisites:
 Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable (x86 and x64)
 Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable Update 2 (x86 and x64)
 PI Network Subsystem 3.4.405.1161
 PI Buffer Subsystem 4.6.0.19
 The PI Web API Windows Installer Database (MSI) file that is signed by
OSIsoft

Installation and Upgrade

Before You Install

1. Verify that the system you plan to use is running a supported operating system.
2. Verify that you can run the installer as an Administrator.

Installation and Upgrades

The PI Web API installer has a graphical user interface, which allows you to perform an
installation or upgrade of PI Web API. At the end of an installation or upgrade, the PI Web
API Admin Utility is automatically launched. You need to go through all the steps in the PI
Web API Admin Utility to complete the installation or upgrade. Detailed information and a
walk-through of installation is available in the PI Web API User Guide.
The PI Web API installer supports silent installations. Please refer to the PI Web API User
Guide for detailed information.

PI Web API 2016 R2 Release Notes Page 4

 Uninstalling PI Web API

Remove the product using Uninstall a program in the Windows Control Panel, or
alternatively, re-run the Installation Kit and follow the prompts to remove the product.
Uninstalling the product will not remove:
 Any SSL certificates that were created during the installation process
 The binding of the selected SSL certificate to the port used by PI Web
API in the Windows HTTP service’s configuration
 The URL reservation for PI Web API in the Windows Kernel routing table
 The locally stored indexes for Indexed Search functionality
The above items may be removed manually if desired.

Documentation Overview
These release notes comprise a part of the following documentation set that supports PI Web
API:
PI Web API 2016 R2 Programmer Reference: This reference is included in the product. It
is an online API reference meant for developers who wish to program against the services
provided in the product. It is accessible as HTML from the link
https://servername/piwebapi/help, where servername is the hostname of the
server on which this product has been installed.
PI Web API 2016 R2 User Guide: This user guide provides information relevant to the
configuration, settings, and administration of the product, and contains steps and helpful
information for resolving problems with the product.
PI Square and PI Developers Club: The OSIsoft PI Square Community website has free
resources to help you with the programming and integration of OSIsoft products. Additional
benefits are available on a paid subscription basis to members of PI Developers Club.
Additional information about the PI Developer Platform, PI Data Archive, PI Asset
Framework, and other topics of interest can be found in respective books available on the
OSIsoft Technical Support and Resources Web site.

PI Web API 2016 R2 Release Notes Page 5

 Technical Support and Resources
For technical assistance, contact OSIsoft Technical Support at +1 510-297-5828 or
[email protected]. The OSIsoft Technical Support website offers additional contact
options for customers outside of the United States.
When you contact OSIsoft Technical Support, be prepared to provide this information:
 Product name, version, and build numbers
 Computer platform (CPU type, operating system, and version number)
 Time that the difficulty started
 Log files at that time
 Details of any environment changes prior to the start of the issue
 Summary of the issue, including any relevant log files during the time the issue occurred

The PI Square community has resources to help you with your technical questions. PI
Developers Club program offers specific services to developers and system integrators.

PI Web API 2016 R2 Release Notes Page 6

 OSIsoft, LLC
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San Leandro, CA 94577 USA
Tel: (01) 510-297-5800
Fax: (01) 510-357-8136
Web: http://www.osisoft.com

PI Web API
© 2013-2016 by OSIsoft, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Version: 1.8.0
Published: 10/17/2016

PI Web API 2016 R2 Release Notes Page 7