OMF application development

Development of OMF applications generally adheres to the following sequence. These phases are described in detail in subsequent topics.

Understand your data

You must understand how the data you intend to send to an on-premises PI System will be organized. Your OMF messages must be written so that appropriate PI AF templates and element hierarchies (with all required attributes and associated PI points) are created in PI Asset Framework and Data Archive, and updated with your time series data.

Write the OMF application

Write OMF messages to create your reference model and start feeding data into the on-premises PI System. It is a good practice to create a separate test or quality assurance environment and database before testing or attempting to write code on a production system. Having a test or QA system makes it easier to remove old code and data and to recover from errors.

Clean up the development environment

After making development changes to your OMF types, instances, and links, you should clean up your environment by deleting tests and older versions.