Collector Toolkit Overview

The Collector Toolkit lets you write programs that integrate tightly with Proficy Historian and let you lever- age the same configuration tools, redundancy schemes, and health monitoring as collectors that ship with Proficy Historian. A custom collector is a collector developed using the Collector Toolkit. It collects data and messages from a data source and writes them to a Data Archiver. Using the Collector Toolkit, you can create custom collectors that:

• Collect data and messages from any data source
• Perform collector compression and buffer collected data
• Report data and messages to a local or remote Data Archiver

Custom collectors can be developed to function much like the standard OPC and iFIX collectors that come with the Proficy Historian product. The collected data can be used in any application that connects to Proficy Historian.

The toolkit enables development of programs that collect data at the current time. It is not suitable for developing migration programs, file import programs, SQL import programs or other programs that produce data which has timestamps in the past. Use other Proficy Historian toolkits to accomplish these task.

The toolkit supports pre-processing raw data with Python Expression Tags during collection, provided that you enable this. For details on how to use these tags, refer to the Python Expression Tags in Data Collectors General .