Substitute illegal characters in PI point and AF element names

In order to prevent using illegal characters in PI point names and AF element names, you can substitute characters in PI Connector for Wonderware Historian.

On the PI Connector for Wonderware Historian site in the Overview section, click Stop connector.

From the Windows start menu, open Services and for PI Connector for Wonderware Historian, click Stop the service.

1. Navigate to Program Files\PIPC\Connectors\WonderwareHistorian\Configuration and open the ConnectorGlobal.config.json file.

2. Add Key-Value pairs to SubstitutionCharactersList, for example: {"Key":"?","Value":"_"} and {"Key":"\\","Value":"b"}

   • You can only substitute the illegal characters in this list: * ' ? ; { } [ | \ ` ". You can not substitute a legal character.

   • Substitution characters are case-sensitive.

   • A character can be replaced with nothing, "".

   • If you use \ (backslash), ' (apostrophe) or " (double quotes) in the key, you need to escape that character with \ (backslash).

   • If more than one character is in the key, you will get an error. If more than one character is in the value, only the first character will be taken.

   • All keys must be unique. Duplicate keys will invalidate the entire list.

     Your modified file should look something like the following:

     {
     "connectorglobal":{
     "ConfigObject":{
     "NewTagDataCollectionStartDate":0001-01-01T00:00:00",
     "IgnoreInitialGoodValue": true,
     "SubstitutionCharactersList":[{"Key":"?","Value":"_"},
     {"Key":"\\","Value":"b"}]
     }
     }
     }

3. Restart the PI Connector for Wonderware Historian service in order for the connector to pick up the changes you just made.

4. Optional: If you intend to modify the data source point prefix, keep the connector stopped, otherwise, restart the connector.

   See Modify the data source point prefix.

New PI points and AF elements with substituted characters will be created once values are received.