Introduction

ZEISS PiWeb software is a set of applications to store, manage and evaluate measurement data usually used for quality assurance in industrial production and other fields. While the PiWeb backend stores data in a structured way and makes it available to the network, PiWeb clients provide statistical and graphical evaluation and reporting. Data to be stored in PiWeb often comes directly from measuring machines producing output files of various formats containing measurement values. To always have current measurement data available, the import of these files needs to be automated.

PiWeb Auto Importer (as part of ZEISS PiWeb software) is an application that allows to automate the import of data files by watching one or more filesystem folders and automatically uploading the measurements of any files that appear in these folders.

Although PiWeb Auto Importer understands most of the common formats typically output by measuring machines, support for customer specific file formats or entirely different data sources like REST services is often required. For this reason PiWeb Auto Importer can be extended via custom plug-ins. The PiWeb Import SDK is a framework that is used to write such custom plug-ins. As this framework is a .NET assembly, the development of import plug-ins is possible in any .NET language. However, we will be using C# examples and setups throughout this documentation.

In the remaining sections we will give you the necessary tools to write your own PiWeb Auto Importer plug-ins. We will also explain more about the inner concepts and workings of such plug-ins and the infrastructure provided by PiWeb Auto Importer for configuring imports, running Windows services and monitoring the configured imports.

In the following section Setup we show you what is necessary for getting your development environment ready to write plug-ins. In Writing plug-ins we then write, run and test a basic but fully functional plug-in step-by-step. The resulting plug-in project is an excellent starting point for developing your own plug-ins. Debugging plug-ins shows you how to analyze problems when your plug-in implementation is not behaving as expected. Deploying plug-ins deals with shipping and installing of your plug-ins. Finally, Advanced topics consists of various articles talking about concepts and features useful for advanced plug-in development like user configuration and plug-in localization.

This documentation is still a draft. Some content is still missing and existing content needs a final revision.