Hi,

PlainVariable shoud be able to handle any UA content, but not “any”. In practice this is anything that a Variant accepts. This can be byte[], basic numeric java types (+ UnsignedXXX ones), DateTime, UUID, XmlElement, NodeId, ExpandedNodeId, StatusCode, QualifiedName, LocalizedText, ExtensionObject, DataValue, (Variant only when in array), or a Structure or Enumeration or (multidimensional)array of these. The generics parameter of a PlainVariable should be one of these (your code seems to use it as raw type, which is not intended).

Custom types are usually Structures. Currently the best option to create these is to use the codegen in the SDK to create java classes from a NodeSet-style xml, which can be created either by hand or UaModeler. For a sample NodeSet file look at the codegen folder in the SDK package (SampleTypes.xml). You can also create same kind of java code by hand without the codegeneration, but it’s not the easiest to do at the moment, because you would then need to create serializers for it manually. In practice all data transfered by UA is in binary at some point, therefore we need to know how to encode and decode it (unless we would handle it as raw binary all the time, but that is not very practical).

BaseDataType is the default because its the equivalent of java’s Object, and we do not know the UA DataType when we construct the object. Also the type hierarchies in UA can be different than java’s, and for some UA types the binary representation of 2 types could be the same Java type. Therefore the UA datatype must be a separate field, and cannot be easily determined from a java object (also because type erasure in generics, obtaining the genericsparameter is tricky)

– Bjarne