That describes AF as a giant, kind of a
super GPS that helps you find things. So, let's get use to
the User Interface to navigate though this
AF Asset database. The primary
User Interface is through something called the PI System Explorer.
That's available through Start Menu.
You should find it under Program Files,
All Programs, PI System, called the PI System Explorer.
Used to be called the AF Explorer, but
it's now the PI System Explorer.
And there's, well this is your Primary Interface.
Let's just kind of go through it, look at, see what's available
First of all, of course, it's got a Menu Bar. This is a Windows
application, so there's all kinds of nice stuff on here. We'll talk
more about importing and exporting
from .xml files into a database,
and then later on we'll talk about searching through Elements using this
little Search that you see over here,
and as you can imagine, other things, some fundamentals like
setting up your Options,
you know, generic Options for AF in general.
That's all available from within here. The different
thing...different Views you can turn On and Off, going
to specific Elements, etc. So, that's all in the Menu
Bar, and it behaves just like any Menu Bar you'd imagine.
The real, the real interest, I think comes in
when you start looking at this Browser. This pane right
here, the one that's currently labeled
Elements, and that's actually very important. Currently it's labeled
Elements. It might be labeled something else
soon, depending on what you've chosen down here. Anyway,
this Browser is what we use to drill down through
the Tree Structure in AF.
So, in this case, we've got this thing called OSIsoft
Enterprises. It's a sample training database.
And, through this OSIsoft
Enterprises we can drill down to find
things within a specific division or geographically,
things that we might be interested in.
Now, in this case, let's say I'm a
Process Engineer in manufacturing. Now I
know we do more than just manufacturing with people IT
Resources, etc., etc. Hey, let's just pay a little homage
to the history. We started out in manufacturing. So let's
say I am interested in
a reactor and all the things about
that reactor I might want to know. So, I will go to
a Division that I'm real familiar with by
drilling down to Division, to the Chemicals Division,
and I know that I'm in Houston so
I can right away ignore these other two.
I'll drill down to Houston. I'm going to look for
this tank. Now, how I find that,
excuse me, this reactor. How I find the reactor
really kind of depends on who I am.
If I'm an E&I Technician, an Electrical
Instrumentation person, I may just want to navigate
this by looking at an Equipment List. I can drill
down through here and say okay, here's all the things:
Flow Meters, Heat Exchangers, Pumps, Reactors, etc.
That's very useful for me to look at that as an Instrument
Technician because they're all the same to me. It's just,
you know they have certain attributes like the Manufacturer, when they were installed,
etc., and that's how I like to find them.
Now, compare that to somebody
who is in Production. He's in Houston,
but he is not going to look at this as a, you know,
as a simple list. He's going to look at it from the point
of view of how the process actually flows.
So, under Production, you'll notice that, well anybody
in Production knows that you start at the Mixing Room,
and there's different components. There's a pump, there's tanks, etc.,
in the Mixing Room, and than that all squishes over
into the Production Line, and from that, within
that Production Line, we find two different Trains: a Preheat Train
and a Reactor Train, and lo and behold, no
big surprise if you're in manufacturing, the Reactor
Train is where you would find the Reactors. So,
as you can see, there's just two different ways in this case
of navigating to the exact same
Object, the exact same Asset. This is called Houston Reactor
101. Hey, that was the same thing we saw up here.
Go into our Equipment List, Reactors,
Houston Reactor 101. Same thing.
So that's how the Browser Pane works.
Now there's a couple of other things about this Browser, like, for example,
if you were to, let's say you've got a brand new Reactor.
Of course, that doesn't happen every day, but let's say you've added
a brand new Reactor, then at the top of
this Reactor Train you can do a right mouse-click here
and say let's do a New
Child Element, and you can add a new Element,
a New Reactor, that's probably going to be based on a
template called a Chemical Reactor, etc., and you can add
that underneath what are
your existing Reactors. We'll talk more
about that and demonstrate more about creating Elements
later on. Now there's a lot I'm leaving out right
now because I'm just interested in talking about navigation. We'll talk
about the Attributes, etc. to
these Assets a little bit later on. We'll go
into those in a lot more detail. But, that's how the
navigation works, and that's what this Browser
allows you to do - to navigate. And, also, this is where you
would go when you wanted to create new
Elements. It's one of the ways you can do it.
Now, the Browser Pane as I mentioned
is, in this case, it's showing me these Elements.
It's labeled Elements. It's only, it's only showing me that
because that's what I've selected down here
in what is known as the Navigator Panel.
The Navigator Panel allows us to choose what it is we're
currently navigating. So, for example,
if I were interested in the
Library Objects that exist on AF
here, I would just click on Library, and now my Browser
is going to browse through these Library Objects.
We're not going to cover this is this class but we
also have a mechanism called Event Frames for looking at
Batch-oriented things, and we are going to look at
Units of Measure later on. So you can see Units of Measure.
Now we're navigating or browsing through those Units of Measure.
So that's the Navigation, or excuse me, the
Navigator Panel. Now, when you select
an Object from this
Browser here -- I think I'll go ahead and select that Reactor
again, Reactor 101 -- when you select it, well,
we obviously need some mechanism to show you what's in there,
to view what's in there. And that's what this is all
about. This is called the Viewer Panel, or Viewer Pane.
So within this Viewer section you can find out
everything you want to know about that Asset.
So we know, for example, it is called
Reactor 101. It is based on a template called
Chemical Reactor, and let's see if it has any
Child Elements. I'm guessing no. And that's correct. It has no
Child Elements. However, Child Elements are simply
Elements within Elements. So, for example, Reactor
Train, as you can see, has these
as Child Elements, the ones underneath that in the Tree
Structure. But, Reactor 101 doesn't.
Now, in addition, this Viewer Pane
has other tabs like Attributes, Ports Versions, etc.
We're going to cover all those later on. Let's, let's just concentrate
though, this General Child etc. These are just
different Windows onto that Asset, so the Assets
can have any of the things that you see here. And, we'll discuss those in more
detail later on. Now,
I kind of omitted something here, one of the more
important things, and that is from the Edit Menu
there is an Option called Search Elements. It's
actually the same thing that you see over here when you
choose to Search. And,
and this Search is controlled by some Options that are set with this little
drop-down right here. One of things I'm going to do so
I can get some actual results is to include the Children.
I guess you would do that with care, depending
on whether you're looking at something that may have millions and millions of Elements
or not, so, you know, we,we turn that
Off by default so it's not going to take
off on a Search that might take an awful long time.
Actually, I shouldn't say that. Our current
scaling, or scalability, is such we are supporting
millions and millions of Elements. So, to be honest,
I'm not sure what kind of results you'll get if you search for millions. But,
in any case, the Default is that it will not include Children so I
went ahead and turned that On. And, what I'll look for now,
let's, let's take a look -- I'll go from the,
let's go from the very top of the hierarchy
here, OSIsoft Enterprises,
again including Children, and let's look
for that Reactor 101. So, there's a couple of
ways I can do this. I can look for h-o-u
for Houston. I can find everything that has that in it.
There we go. Now, that shows
up here in the View. This is the Search Results.
It also shows up in a place you might not expect it,
and I'll be honest, this surprised me. It shows up over here
in your, this Browser.
So, in the Browser window, you
will now see, not
underneath, but just kind of at the same level
as your main hierarchy here, you will see those
Search Results. And, each time you do another
Search, we're going to stack another set of Search Results over here.
So don't let that surprise you. I know it surprised me.
Let me show you another example. I'll
search for, I think it was Houston Reactor 101.
Right? , I know for a fact, I
think, well, let's test. I think this is the only
Reactor 101 we're going to see, so if I
Search for Reactor 101 -- I'll go ahead and choose
Search. It looks like there are three: one in Houston,
one in San Leandro, and one in Montreal.
So, but as you can see, what we're
doing is we're simply going through the entire hierarchy
here and finding those things
that match, and as I mentioned, also, you'll see
these things show up, these Quick Searches are
showing up over here on your Viewer as well. So, you can,
you can go back and revisit Searches that you did earlier.
And when you want to delete those, you can just do a right-click
and Delete. We'll just warn you we're about to
delete it, and then those are deleted.
I haven't seen anybody do this, but
be careful you don't delete this. This actually will delete
your database. We do give you a different Error Message.
Hey, you know, all references are going to be deleted. No.
So, that's Search. You know, if I were
to do a Search and delete that, that's no problem.
If I were to accidentally delete
this, that would be a problem. So, watch out for that.
Now, in addition to that Search, we also have
an Events Search. So this brings up a new
Dialog Box, and from here what I can do is exploit
some of the features like the Category,
the Categories that are available
within these Assets. All the Assets that you create, all the
Elements, can be assigned to certain Categories. There's
only one Category here. Let me just make sure
this -- remember the Children Elements? We've
referred to them here as Sub-elements.
If I search for everything that matches that
Category -- there we go. You notice everything, that in the
Category Head, now shows up.
Or, I could search, instead of that, I can search for
things just based on a certain template. So, I'll search just
for all my Chemical Reactors. Do a quick Search.
It found 12 results.
I'll go ahead and select them all.
And, when I click on OK, now
we've added that to this Browser Window.
So, if I want to look at my Asset
called Houston Reactor 101, there is that
Reactor again.