App Store Connect Release Notes

This page describes the release notes for App Store Connect. Your App Store Connect will automatically download the update. You can configure the update schedule for your App Store Connect by following the instructions available here.

Release Date: 2024-05-03

Build Number: 3.2.20238

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• [Enhancement] Performance improvements when applying authorization rules.
• [Enhancement] All data sources now support the ability to force data writes to go to snapshot or history.

Alarm Analysis Driver:

• [Enhancement] Facit annotations are now treated as read-only and have had their “more info” links amended.

Azure Event Hub/IoT Hub Driver:

• [Enhancement] Improvements to JSON payload parsing to support MQTT-style wildcards when including or excluding properties from the JSON document.

CSV Driver:

• [Enhancement] Reduced memory usage.

IP Historian/Edge Historian v2 Driver:

• [Enhancement] The tag cache can now be disabled to reduce memory usage. Tag searches will be slower when the cache is disabled.
• [Enhancement] The health status for a running IP Historian driver now includes the health status of the Elasticsearch cluster that the driver is connected to.

IP Historian/Edge Historian v3 Driver:

• [Enhancement] Alpha package includes a preview driver for IP Historian v3.
  • IP Historian v3 is a major update to IP Historian that requires Elasticsearch v7 or later. You must provide your own Elasticsearch cluster to use IP Historian v3.

Met Office Driver:

• [Enhancement] Updated to consult the latest Met Office Data Hub (https://datahub.metoffice.gov.uk/)
  • Supported weather plans now include: Global hourly spot, Global three hourly spot and Global daily spot.
• [Enhancement] Changes to how three-hourly forecast are recorded.
• [Enhancement] Significant Weather description accompanies Significant Weather Code - e.g. 1 : Sunny Day

RabbitMQ Driver:

• [Enhancement] Improvements to JSON payload parsing to support MQTT-style wildcards when including or excluding properties from the JSON document.

Release Date: 2024-03-22

Build Number: 3.2.20136

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• [Enhancement] General layout improvements for the App Store Connect UI, including a better experience on smaller screen devices.
• [Enhancement] Layout improvements to the configuration UI for data sources, event sources and event sinks. It is now easier to navigate between setting categories and apply filters to locate the setting(s) that you are looking for.
• [Enhancement] Layout improvements to the data stream UI. You can quickly switch between the latest observations and the rule definitions using a tabbed view.
• [Enhancement] Improvements to relative timestamp parsing in data queries. In addition to using * as a placeholder for the current time, it is now also possible to specify a number of additional relative time origin keywords, including the start of the current hour, day, week, month and year. The time zone for the relative time origin can be specified using the tz query string parameter or X-TimeZone request header on any API call. The time zone is specified using the IANA time zone database format (e.g. America/New_York) or the Microsoft time zone identifier (e.g. Eastern Standard Time).
  • Timestamp parsing improvements have been made possible by delegating parsing to Intelligent Plant's Relativity library.
• [Fix] Fixes an issue where clicking on a link in the UI to view details for a tag or script tag was not always able to load the details page. This was caused by an issue with the way the UI was handling some encoded names/IDs.
• [Fix] Fixes an issue where script tags that were triggered by snapshot value changes in referenced tags would not trigger if the referenced tag was another script tag.
• [Fix] Renaming a source or destination tag used in a data stream tag mapping now correctly removes the last observation for the old mapping from the UI.

Azure Event Hub/IoT Hub Driver:

• [Enhancement] When parsing ad hoc JSON payloads, the consumer driver now supports parsing the payload using custom JavaScript. The script is invoked for every incoming message, but can opt to pass the payload onto the default parser. This allows for more complex parsing scenarios than the default parser can handle.

IP Historian/Edge Historian Driver:

• [Enhancement] When configuring a linked interface tag for an IP Historian tag, it is now possible to specify the direction of the link (i.e. whether the linked tag is a source or destination for the IP Historian tag).
• [Enhancement] When configuring an IP Historian data stream rule, you can choose if the rule is an ingress rule or an egress rule. The interface tag link direction for IP Historian tags is used to determine if the tag supports ingress or egress.
• [Enhancement] An automatic egress rule can be configured for IP Historian data sources, in addition to the existing automatic ingress rule.
• [Enhancement] The publish intervals for automatic ingress and egress rules are now configuraable via driver settings.
• [Enhancement] Improvements to the in-memory tag definition cache.

MQTT Consumer Driver (alpha package only):

• [Enhancement] New preview driver for receiving messages from MQTT brokers supporting all versions of MQTT up to and including v5.0. The existing legacy MQTT driver does not support MQTT 5.0.

MQTT Server Driver (alpha package only):

• [Enhancement] New preview driver that runs an MQTT broker, allowing external clients to publish messages that are converted into tag values.
  • The driver supports the same ad hoc JSON parsing rules as the Azure Event Hub and RabbitMQ drivers.
  • The MQTT broker is for ingress only; it does not allow clients to subscribe to receive value changes or messages from other Data Core sources.

OPC UA Driver:

• [Enhancement] Adds support for writing tag values.
  • Writing array values is not currently supported.
• [Enhancement] Asset model nodes and tags now include the access permissions that the driver has on the tag or node.
• [Enhancement] Server certificates that fail validation are now logged so that the certificate can be inspected and trusted if required.
• [Enhancement] Client certificates no longer need to have a trusted root certificate to be used for client authentication. This simplifies the use of self-signed client certificates.

RabbitMQ Driver:

• [Enhancement] When parsing ad hoc JSON payloads, the consumer driver now supports parsing the payload using custom JavaScript. The script is invoked for every incoming message, but can opt to pass the payload onto the default parser. This allows for more complex parsing scenarios than the default parser can handle.

Release Date: 2024-01-26

Build Number: 3.2.19859

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• Miscellaneous performance improvements, in particular to data streams.
• All setting names in DataCore.settings.json are now case-insensitive.
• DataCore.settings.json now allows settings to be specified using nested JSON objects. For example, the following configuration is now valid and is equivalent to specifying a non-nested property named DataCore:Application:Name:

{
  "DataCore": {
    "Application": {
      "Name": "My App Store Connect"
    }
  }
}

• The default file system-based key/value store can now buffer pending changes in memory and periodically flushes them to disk. In particular, this improves performance when the system is configured to run large numbers of script tags or in-memory buffer tags that persist values to disk. Background flush is enabled by setting the DataCore:DataStore:FlushInterval configuration setting in DataCore.settings.json to a time span value e.g. 00:00:10 for a 10 second flush interval.
• The C# script tag engine now allows compilation to be skipped for script tags built from templates. This can significantly improve startup time when using large numbers of script tags. Compilation skipping can be enabled by setting the DataCore:ScriptEngine:CSharp:SkipTemplateCompilation configuration setting in DataCore.settings.json to true.

CSV Driver:

• The driver now correctly applies both per-tag and per-query sample limits.

In-Memory Buffer Driver:

• When configured to persist tag values, the buffer now provides a setting to specify if values should be persisted to a single data store key, or if one key per tag should be used. The latter option is the default behaviour as it mirrors the existing behaviour of the buffer. The former option can be used to reduce the number of keys that need to be read from or written to disk when using a file system-based data store, which can help to improve performance when buffering large numbers of tags.

IP Historian/Edge Historian:

• Better handling of data queries that specify tags that do not exist.
• Performance improvement when writing large numbers of samples to the driver.

Microsoft Azure Event Hub/IoT Hub Driver:

• Fixes an issue where the consumer driver was not correctly processing messages received from the Event Hub.

Remapper Driver:

• Tag searches for script tags now work correctly.

Release Date: 2023-10-02

Build Number: 3.2.19629

This hotfix patches the following issues:

AVEVA OSIsoft PI/AF Drivers:

• Fixes an issue where all tag values returned from PI and AF queries were being assigned the current UTC time as their timestamp.

RabbitMQ Consumer Driver:

• Fixes an issue in the Rabbit MQ consumer driver where messages that were sent without any custom headers could not be processed.

Release Date: 2023-09-29

Build Number: 3.2.19623

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• All drivers can define a startup delay to wait for before the driver will be initialised.
• Significant performance improvements when performing a bulk creation of tag definitions in the App Store Connect UI.
• Fixes a memory leak that could occur when running a driver out-of-process causing the external executable to eventually crash. This issue was typically observed when using the OPC Classic (DA/HDA/AE) driver, which needs to run in a 32-bit process.
• Data stream rules can now filter values that get sent to destination tags using value change, exception and compression filtering. This is a preview feature that does not currently have a configuration UI. Please contact us for more information!
• Updates to the latest version of the App Store Connect adapters toolkit. Among other things, this update fixes issues where toolkit-based drivers could cause the App Store Connect UI to display the incorrect runtime health status for the driver.
• Ensures that unmanaged resources created by drivers such as TCP listeners are correctly stopped when the App Store Connect runtime is being stopped in order to apply an update.

AVEVA Wonderware Driver:

• Integer-based tags now automatically provide a visualisation hint that they should be displayed using stepped lines.

In-Memory Buffer Driver:

• When persisting values to disk, the buffer now ensures that values that are waiting to be trimmed are not saved.

Microsoft Azure Event Hub/IoT Hub Driver:

• Significant performance and memory usage improvements.
• Adds the ability to batch multiple observations together into a single Azure Event Hub message, and to compress the message payload.

Modbus Driver:

• Robustness improvements to handle scenarios where the Modbus device crashes.
• CSV mapping files now support configuring a factor and offset for a mapping. If specified, this takes precedence over the “scale low” and “scale high” columns.

OpenTelemetry Metrics Driver:

• Adds min/max tags for histogram instruments.

TCP Printer Driver:

• Adds settings to control if event messages are trimmed before being emitted to remove leading and trailing white space, and if event messages that consist solely of white space are emitted or discarded.

Prometheus Driver (canary stream only):

• New driver for reading metrics from HTTP endpoints that use the Prometheus exposition format.

RabbitMQ Driver:

• Improvements to connection resiliency and telemetry.
• Significant performance and memory usage improvements.
• Adds the ability to batch multiple observations together into a single RabbitMQ message, and to compress the message payload.

Release Date: 2023-04-28

Build Number: 3.2.19254

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• App Store Connect now uses HTTP/2 by default for all HTTP requests when running on Windows 11 or Windows Server 2022 or later.
• Improved handling when App Store Connect reconnects to the Industrial App Store without a full disconnection being detected by SignalR.
• Adds support for the v3.0.0 App Store Connect adapter toolkit clients and base libraries.
• UI now adds a two-click solution for recording any non-IP Historian tag to IP Historian when the historian has an automatic ingress rule enabled (see below).
• Disabled driver instances are now displayed in separate groups in the UI.
• Fixes an issue where App Store Connect would never connect to the Industrial App Store if an active network connection was not available at startup time.
• Fixes an issue where an error during data stream initialisation could prevent other rules from initialising.
• Miscellaneous small fixes and performance improvements

Big Data Drivers:

• Fix for an issue where event selection could fail to advance if querying from multiple big data sources.

CSV Driver:

• Memory usage is reduced, in particular for large CSV data sets.
• Fix an issue where queries for best-fit or interpolated data over large numbers of raw samples could cause a lage spike in memory.
• Fix an issue where the “Maximum Raw Query Sample Count” setting was not being correctly applied when retrieving raw samples for aggregation.

IP Historian/Edge Historian

• New simplified user experience when configuring IP Historian tags using the Data Core/App Store Connect UI.
• A new driver setting allows creation of an automatic ingress data stream rule for IP Historian whenever the driver starts. This rule creates data stream mappings for all destination IP Historian tags that have source information configured.
• `PLOT` data queries now correctly use step interpolation when interpolating values for tags that have the “prefer stepped visualisation” flag set.
• Deleting a tag no longer deletes its history or annotations from the big data store.

Modbus Driver:

• Add a connection timout to all Modbus TCP connections.
• Add an optional shutdown grace period to be configured to allow an ongoing operation to complete if the driver is being shut down.

RabbitMQ Drivers:

• Rabbit MQ data/event source and event sink drivers are now available as preview drivers in the stable release package. RabbitMQ can be used for reliable data transfer between Data Core/App Store Connect nodes.

Wonderware Driver:

• Add driver setting to allow the Wonderware `wwTimeStampRule` query parameter to be explicitly specified when querying the SQL interface.

Release Date: 2022-09-23

Build Number: 3.2.18489

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• All drivers now have a configurable startup timeout (defaults to 2 minutes). This prevents rogue or badly-configured drivers from blocking App Store Connect startup.
• Generation of tag mappings in all data stream rules has been rewritten to improve startup time.
• Data stream rules can now specify a minimum sample quality filter e.g. a rule can specify that source values with bad quality are discarded instead of being forwarded to destination tags.
• Data stream rules can now have a startup priority associated with them. Note that this cannot yet be assigned via the App Store Connect UI.
• All templated script tags can now configure an evaluation delay in the same way that ad hoc script tags can.
• `HiLoLimitMonitor` script tag now supports on delays and off delays.
• When reconnecting to the Industrial App Store, App Store Connect now processes all reconnection attempts on a dedicated background task.
• Fixes an issue where script tags can get “stuck” when processing a data set containing duplicate timestamps for an individual tag.
• Fixes an issue that could cause an App Store Connect to think that there was a mismatch between its local drivers and the proxies for its local drivers on the Industrial App Store.

Alarm Analysis Data Source:

• Alarm State Tag - historical view of Alarm State can now be added into e.g. process trends.

Big Data Event Source:

• Improvements to the way message backlogs/historical catch-up are processed.

CSV Data Source:

• CSV driver can now optionally filter out samples that duplicate the same value on contiguous rows. This is useful when running demo data sets with large numbers of tags and rows.

IP Historian/Edge Historian Data Source:

• Add metrics related to writing samples to the historian archive.
• Fixes issue where description and unit tag search filters were not being correctly applied.
• Fixes an issue in `PLOT` queries where NaN values could cause spiking values to be omitted from the query result.

Modbus Data Source:

• Startup performance improvements when using mapping CSV files that reference a large number of Modbus addresses.
• Reduction in memory usage when polling Modbus devices and when caching snapshot values.
• Add metrics related to polling of Modbus devices.
• Default operation delay on Modbus data sources is now 100ms. This ensures better reliability when connecting to a serial port device.

Remapper Data Source:

• New preview driver (available in alpha channel).
• Acts as a reverse proxy to tags on other data sources (i.e. allows you to create a single data source where tags from multiple other data sources can be queried).
• Mappings configured via CSV file.

Serial Printer Event Source:

• Driver extended to expose “handshake” control protocol properties used in establishing a serial port communication.
• “Intelligent Response” implemented. This allows the driver to detect and respond to control messages written to the serial port.

Release Date: 2022-04-29

Build Number: 17828

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• Improved telemetry metrics.
• New content security policy for the App Store Connect user interface.
• Mitigations against some websocket deadlock issues that can prevent App Store Connect from being stopped or restarted.
• The timeout used by App Store Connect when registering with the Industrial App Store has been increased.
• Improvements to the way that App Store Connect processes requests received from the Industrial App Store. These improvements will be enabled automatically once the changes are enabled in the IAS Data APIs.
• Improvements to the way that data stream rules are initialised, so that rules are now initialised in serial to reduce overhead at startup time when multiple rules with large numbers of tag mappings are used.
• Improvements to the way that App Store Connect notifies the Industrial App Store of driver lifetime events.

Alarm Analysis Event Sink:

• When parsing events generated by Facit, the tag and alarm identifier are now inferred from the script tag name and event name respectively.

Edge Historian:

• Fixes an issue where the text display value for a sample could be incorrect in requests for interpolated or average values.

Modbus:

• Improved health check UI messages.
• Sub-second polling intervals can now be specified.
• Tags that do not use a Modbus address as their tag name are now always sorted first in tag searches.
• Driver can optionally prevent its default polling interval from being overridden by individual tag definitions.

Azure Event Hubs:

• Azure Event Hub drivers now have support for message digests (SHA-384), HMAC-based message signatures (HMAC-SHA384), and encrypted message bodies (AES-256-CTR).

Taggle:

• Fixed some tag indexing bugs.

NOTE: Roll-out of this release was paused due to issues where some clients did not have .NET Framework 4.8 installed. Roll-out will resume on 11 March.

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• .NET Framework 4.8 required.
• App Store Connect will now compress query responses it sends to the Industrial App Store by default.
• Improvements to driver initialisation.
• Improvements to data stream when initialising auto-archiving data stream rules for data sources.
• Script tags can now configure an evaluation delay that is applied between the trigger firing and the script being evaluated.
• When creating a script tag, the start time for the initial calculation can be supplied instead of being inferred from the input data settings. This allows the script tag to start calculating from any point in history up until the current time.

Alarm Analysis:

• Improvements to advanced filter queries.

OPC Classic:

• Set default DCOM authentication level on remote OPC connections to Packet Integrity as required by Microsoft's mitigations for CVE-2021-26414.
• Fixes an issue where some OPC AE event message fields were not included in the equivalent App Store Connect event message object.

TCP Printer Event Source:

• Refactored to share the same core implementation as the Serial Printer Event Stream driver.
• Limitations can now be placed on the number of concurrent TCP sessions.

Azure Event Hub:

• New preview drivers for publishing values to and receiving values from Microsoft Azure Event Hubs. The consumer driver also has the ability to parse arbitrary JSON payloads into separate tag values.

Metrics:

• New preview driver for collecting readings from OpenTelemetry-compatible metric instruments and publishing them as tag values.

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• Telemetry improvements.
• App Store Connect now uses v2.2 of the App Store Connect adapter toolkit when connecting to 3rd party drivers (https://github.com/intelligentplant/AppStoreConnect.Adapters).
• In limit monitor script tags, you can now choose how the monitor should handle scenarios where a limit tag value is NaN. Previously, it was only possible to configure this behaviour for process tag values, meaning that a NaN limit tag value could cause the calculation's progress to become stuck.
• Aggregate calculator script tag template now uses the timestamp provided to it by the script engine when computing samples, rather than the timestamp returned by the underlying historian that aggregates the data.
• Fixes an issue where computing the previous trigger time before a start time for a CRON schedule could result in the start time being returned by mistake.
• Fixes an issue where event sources that were run out-of-process did not correctly create subscriptions to emit event messages.
• Refactor data stream implementation (for transferring real-time or historical data from source to destination data sources) to improve handling of downstream back pressure.
• Snapshot data stream rules that use a forwarding interval can now choose to forward only the most-recently-received values for each tag at the end of each interval.
• Allow HTTP requests being sent to an App Store Connect (e.g. from a process control network) to use GZip compression in the request body.

Alarm Analysis:

• Adds support for importing and exporting Alarm Response Manual with custom field support. The update changes the way that ARM data is indexed and will perform a one-off reindex of existing records; existing ARM users are advised to check their data after applying the update. Full documentation is available in the App Store Connect user interface under Documentation / Alarm Analysis / Alarm Response Manual (ARM).
• When visualising Alarm Analysis data in Gestalt Trend, data series will now be displayed using trailing edge instead of interpolating a straight lie between samples.

AVEVA Wonderware:

• Fixes an issue where multiple results could be returned for digital tags in tag search and data queries.
• Fixes an issue where values-at-times queries returned NaN values.
• Adds support for Wonderware 2010 running on SQL Server 2008 SP3.

Big Data Event Source:

• Modification of how “lag” is handled during document polling. The “Lag” parameter protects against skipping past documents that have not appeared in the Elasticsearch index yet (documents do not appear until an index refreshes, and even then, not all documents appear simultaneously). Rather than filtering for documents that have a “creation-time < now-lag”, we now exclude documents that have a “route.timestamp > now-lag”. This provides better protection for deployments where events transit through multiple nodes/hops (i.e. where the creation time may no longer be a recent value).

CSV:

• Performance and resource usage improvements when aggregating CSV data.

HTTP Proxy:

• If the endpoint for an HTTP proxy data source is not available when the driver starts, an error will now be raised immediately instead of the driver getting caught in an infinite retry loop.
• HTTP proxy data source can now optionally disable persistent real-time connection if it is not required.

IP Historian/Edge Historian:

• IP Historian data stream rule will now automatically create a mapping if a source tag is created that is already referenced by an existing destination IP Historian tag.
• Fixes an issue where a tag's compression filter would temporarily block incoming values if the last-archived value for the tag was NaN.

Modbus:

• Adds support for reading/writing 64-bit numeric values (IEEE 754 floating point, signed/unsigned long integers).
• Adds support for reading/writing UTF-8 strings (in addition to existing support for ASCII strings).
• Allows a hosted Modbus device to be configured using the same CSV device map files used when connecting to remote Modbus devices. This allows Modbus devices hosted by App Store Connect to use all supported Modbus data types instead of coercing all values received from other data sources into 32-bit floating point numbers.
• Attempts to write NaN values to address ranges intended for numeric values via Data Core will now be rejected.

OPC UA:

• Non-fatal connection issues no longer cause the OPC UA driver to stop processing a subscription. Previously, an intermittent issue such as a timeout when polling the OPC UA server to check for new subscription items would cause the driver to treat the subscription as completed with a failure.
• Self-signed X.509 client certificates can now be loaded from the Windows certificate store as well as from the file system.

This release brings the following changes:

General:

• General bug fixes and improvements.
• Initial support for exporting App Store Connect trace information using the OpenTelemetry standard.
• App Store Connect now uses v2.0 of the App Store Connect adapter toolkit when connecting to 3rd party drivers (https://github.com/intelligentplant/AppStoreConnect.Adapters).
• New script tag templates.
• Naming conventions can optionally be enforced when creating data sources [PREVIEW].
  • This allows rules to be defined so that e.g. all Modbus data sources on a node must have a name that starts with 'Modbus-'.

IP Historian/Edge Historian:

• Performance and stability improvements.

AVEVA Wonderware:

• Performance and stability improvements for the AVEVA Wonderware driver.

OPC UA:

• Performance and stability improvements for the OPC UA driver.

MT Connect:

• New driver for MTConnect (https://www.mtconnect.org/) [PREVIEW].

App Store Connect Service update available.

The App Store Connect Service is the host that supports the running App Store Connect process. Unlike the App Store Connect process, it requires manual intervention to update. The service can be updated by downloading and running the App Store Connect Installer.

NB. Reinstalling App Store Connect may reset some custom configuration options. If in doubt, consult support@intelligentplant.com.

Changes include:

• Improved shut-down and restart control
• Requires .Net 4.8 (included in installer)

This release contains the following changes:

• Recovery improvements when an App Store Connect is unexpectedly disconnected from the Industrial App Store (e.g. due to a network issue).
• Improvements to Edge Historian query performance.
• Improvements to the Alarm Analysis programmable transform.
• The Modbus driver can now be used to host a virtual Modbus TCP device.

• Alarm Analysis licensing. Unlicensed AA (Alarm Analysis) data sources will respond with 'Subscription not found or expired' message which indicates that the data source needs to be licensed. For details on how to apply a licence please check the steps here or contact support@intelligentplant.com.

• Alarm Analysis Data Source Driver
  • Day count aggregations simplified to use a 24hr period. Previously, the Alarm Analysis driver would accomodate time-zone logic. Now however, it is the responsibility of the calling app (e.g. Alarm Analysis, SoE Explorer, Facit, etc…) to handle timezone.
  • Foundations for Alarm Analysis licensing.

This release contains the following changes:

• Improvements to the Alarm Analysis data source driver in preparation for the next Alarm Analysis app release.
• Edge Historian tags can be configured to record the current value only (i.e. no history).
• New aggregate functions supported in Edge Historian: `AnnotationCount`, `Count`, `PercentGood`, `PercentBad`, `Range`, `Delta`, `StdDev`, `Variance`
• `Range` aggregate function now supported in OSIsoft PI and AF drivers.
• Improvements to automatic reconnection in PI and AF drivers.
• Fix for older versions of IE when browsing tags in the App Store Connect UI.
• Improvements to the App Store Connect trending UI.
• Miscellaneous small improvements.

This release contains the following changes:

• Improvements and bug fixes related to Alarm Analysis data import and reporting queries.
• Improvements and bug fixes related to the restart of data stream rules (used to transfer real-time data from a source data source to a destination data source such as App Store Connect's Edge Historian).
• Fixes for some C# script tag templates that called back into Data Core for historical data.
• JavaScript-based script tags are now deprecated in favour of C#-based script tags.
• A new driver for Aspentech IP.21, capable of interfacing with its HTTP-based REST API. This driver is in preview and will receive improvements over the coming months.
• Miscellaneous bug fixes.