Data Types in Rapid Toolkit for Sparkplug

Sparkplug has its own type system, based on a set of built-in types. The types in Microsoft .NET are different, and all data is represented using an Object type and its derivatives. Conversions between the two are available, but not always fully possible.

In addition, not everything that can be stored in an Object can later be processed by all .NET tools and languages. Microsoft has created so-called Common Language Specification (CLS), which has certain rules and restrictions that, if followed, guarantee cross-language compatibility. Public Connectivity Software components (assemblies) are fully CLS compliant, and that includes the way the data types are converted to and from Sparkplug types.

If you inspect the conversions that do not match 1:1, you will notice that most of them have to do with unsigned integer types (except Byte). This is because there are .NET languages that do not have such types, and cannot process them. A typical example of such example in frequent use is VB.NET.

Rapid Toolkit for Sparkplug converts data from Sparkplug to .NET and vice versa according to following table:

Sparkplug type	.NET type (Object), in C# notation
Boolean	System.Boolean
BooleanArray	System.Boolean[]
Bytes	System.Byte[]
DateTime	System.DateTime (UTC)
DateTimeArray	System.DateTime[] (UTC)
Double	System.Double
DoubleArray	System.Double[]
Float	System.Single
FloatArray	System.Single[]
Int16	System.Int16
Int16Array	System.Int16[]
Int32	System.Int32
Int32Array	System.Int32[]
Int64	System.Int64
Int64Array	System.Int64[]
Int8	System.Int16
Int8Array	System.Int16[]
String	System.String
StringArray	System.String[]
Text	System.String
UInt16	System.Int32
UInt16Array	System.Int32[]
UInt32	System.Int64
UInt32Array	System.Int64[]
UInt64	System.Decimal
UInt64Array	System.Decimal[]
UInt8	System.Byte
UInt8Array	System.Byte[]
Uuid	System.Guid

Types that are highlighted do not convert from Sparkplug to their “natural” .NET counterparts, because the corresponding .NET type is not CLS compliant. Instead, a “wider” type that is CLS compliant is chosen.

Types not listed in the above table at all are not supported.

Strings are internally represented in Unicode.

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