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Bosch IoT Device Management: new live channel condition and twin update from live data

Dec 22, 2021

Our latest service release of Bosch IoT Things – the digital twin layer of Bosch IoT Device Management – comes with the following new features:

Live channel condition

With the latest release, Bosch IoT Things supports you in automatic switching between twin and live channel when retrieving device data via API.

By using the new condition, your application can transparently benefit from both channels with just one request. In case the device cannot answer in time, your application will still retrieve a response with the required value. The response headers make it easy to find out who responded: the live device or its digital twin.

This channel switch is supported via HTTP API, WebSocket, and Ditto protocol over all types of managed connection. With the upcoming Ditto release 2.3, the feature will also be supported via Ditto Java client.

The conditions can be defined using RQL expressions. See details at HTTP API – Search resources for all Relational operators and Logical operators.

The following schematic overview illustrates the overall communication flow:

live response and twin update

Example 1

Use the live-channel-condition to retrieve data from the device itself, if a specific attribute has a defined value.

GET .../things/{thingId}?live-channel-condition=eq(attributes/useLiveChannel,true)

  • If the condition matches, the retrieve command is forwarded to the device as live command defined as Ditto Protocol message, and the device can answer by creating a correlated response.
  • If the condition doesn’t match (for example, the attribute does not exist or has another value), the service will provide the response data from the digital twin persisted in Bosch IoT Things.

 

Example 2

Use the ConnectionStatus feature in the condition. If the device is currently ready to receive messages, request live data, otherwise request twin data.

GET .../things/{thingId}?live-channel-condition=gt(features/ConnectionStatus/properties/status/readyUntil,time:now)

 

New request header

You can additionally make use of the new header live-channel-timeout-strategy. The header value holds a strategy what to do in case a timeout was encountered.

  • If the value cannot be retrieved live from the device itself during the specified timeout, the request will fail (which is the default strategy if not specified otherwise) with a status code 408.
  • Alternatively, if you define use-twin as the live-channel-timeout-strategy strategy, the request will fall back to the persisted twin and return the latest value stored in the digital twin.

 

New response headers

The response includes two additional headers to indicate which channel was used to retrieve the thing data:

  • live-channel-condition-matched – value can be true or false and states whether the passed live-channel-condition was a match or not.
  • channel – value can be twin or live and defines which channel was the origin of the returned data.

 

Twin update from live data

In line with the procedure described above on how to retrieve live data directly from your device, we have introduced a new type of pre-configured payload mapping, namely UpdateTwinWithLiveResponse.

Upon activation, the digital twin stored in Bosch IoT Things will implicitly be updated with the latest data from the live response sent by the device.

Tip: You can easily activate this mapper using the Connections UI. Select “Devices via Bosch IoT Hub” > Edit > “Payload mapping” > checkbox “Enable updating twins based on received live retrieve command responses”.

The new functionality is based on new features of our open source base Eclipse Ditto.
Further details are described in Eclipse Ditto:

At this occasion, various minor bugs have also been fixed.