Quite a while ago, I wrote a small IoT Simulator in Go that creates or deletes multiple IoT devices in IoT Hub and sends telemetry at a preset interval. However, when you use version 0.4 of the simulator, you will encounter issues in the following cases:
- You create a route to store telemetry in an Azure Storage account: the telemetry will be base 64 encoded
- You create an Event Grid subscription that forwards the telemetry to an Azure Function or other target: the telemetry will be base 64 encoded
For example, in Azure Storage, when you store telemetry in JSON format, you will see something like this with versions 0.4 and older:
{"EnqueuedTimeUtc":"2020-02-10T14:13:19.0770000Z","Properties":{},"SystemProperties":{"connectionDeviceId":"dev35","connectionAuthMethod":"{\"scope\":\"hub\",\"type\":\"sas\",\"issuer\":\"iothub\",\"acceptingIpFilterRule\":null}","connectionDeviceGenerationId":"637169341138506565","contentType":"application/json","contentEncoding":"","enqueuedTime":"2020-02-10T14:13:19.0770000Z"},"Body":"eyJUZW1wZXJhdHVyZSI6MjYuNjQ1NjAwNTMyMTg0OTA0LCJIdW1pZGl0eSI6NDQuMzc3MTQxODcxODY5OH0="}
Note that the body is base 64 encoded. The encoding stems from the fact that UTF-8 encoding was not specified as can be seen in the JSON. contentEncoding is indeed empty and the contentType does not mention the character set.
To fix that, a small code change was required. Note that the code uses HTTP to send telemetry, not MQTT or AMQP:
With the character set as UTF-8, the telemetry in the Storage Account will look like this:
{"EnqueuedTimeUtc":"2020-02-11T15:02:07.9520000Z","Properties":{},"SystemProperties":{"connectionDeviceId":"dev15","connectionAuthMethod":"{\"scope\":\"hub\",\"type\":\"sas\",\"issuer\":\"iothub\",\"acceptingIpFilterRule\":null}","connectionDeviceGenerationId":"637169341138088841","contentType":"application/json; charset=utf-8","contentEncoding":"","enqueuedTime":"2020-02-11T15:02:07.9520000Z"},"Body":{"Temperature":20.827852028684607,"Humidity":49.95058826575425}}
Note that contentEncoding is still empty here, but contentType includes the charset. That is enough for the body to be in plain text.
The change will also allow you to use queries on the body in IoT Hub message routing filters or Event Grid subscription filters.
Enjoy the new version 0.5! All three of you… 😉😉😉
baeke.info 