What Asset Framework Needs – A Web-Based PI System Explorer
My previous post about .NET 5 leads me to another suggestion. The Asset Framework needs a modern web-based client. As anyone who uses the fat-client PI System Explorer knows, keeping everyone up to date can be challenging.
The PI System Explorer, or PSE for short, is a powerful editor with a lot of smarts built in. When you edit the hierarchy in PSE, you are checking out elements in the background, but the edits are in memory on your client until you commit them to the master database.
Building a web client using javascript or typescript would be a lot of work because you would need to reproduce all of that logic in a new language, but what if you could do it in .NET 5 and Blazor Webassembly?
This might be the best way to use the existing logic and produce a web-based client that rivals the polish of the existing fat client. That is a winning combination, in my opinion.
I fully agree, the need to visualise how the Asset Framework is configured only grows.
Such a tool was tested out internally within what was then OSIsoft. It used PI Web API’s plugin architecture to render a PSE like interface in a browser and was an optional install of PI Web API. This was sadly canceled, but let’s hope it will be brought back to life one day.