Now, if you are one of those system managers who's got
tens of thousands of PI Tags that you have to modify, here's some real good news.
We do have a mechanism for managing all your PI Tags
within Excel, and this is done through an
add-in. The add-in is called A Tag Configurator,
and it's already installed on this machine. It actually gets installed
when I install this PI SMT.
So, SMT's here. I know the add-in is here
but it's just not hooked into Excel. So, what I need to
do is in - well, in Office 2007 I go in
here into this Windows button, choose Excel Options,
and go into Add-Ins and then choose Go.
Now for those of you who have
Office 2003, just go into Tools,
and then within Tools go into Add-Ins and you will get to this same
place here. Now, once you get here, to this Add-In's little
widget here, just go out and Browse for the add-in.
Now this add-in,
it's called PITagConf.xla
and you will find it within your -- this is going to be
under Program Files, PIPC, under,
I believe it's called SMT,
Actually, I am not sure which one - is it SMT3?
I am sorry, it's the other one -- SMT,
and here it is. It's
PI -- it's called PITagConf.xla. .xla stands for
Excel Add-In. Okay. And now that I have done
that, it shows up here as PITagConf
Configurator 32-bit. Now it's going to show up --
we do not have any support for it -- under the,
the ribbon here. Now you will find that there is a PI
Option here, but that PI Option is for DataLink. And we do
support the ribbon in Office 2007 there.
Here, though, you will have to go into Add-Ins and under Add-Ins you will find
this PI SMT. This is where you will find it.
So, within SMT there are some settings we should
go over real quickly, and then we will demonstrate how to do this.
Now, we have this option to connect to PI Server on start-up.
And, really, this comes to the issue of how
much, how often do you use SMT for editing Tags
vs how often you use Excel
for doing other things. I, I will be honest. If, if I,
you know, I am in, in and out of Excel must be 40 times
a day. I, I do not really want this connecting to PI if it's going to
take ten seconds or 2, even 3 seconds to connect. I do not
want it slowing me down. So, it's up to you. You can
choose to have this every time it starts up,
or you can choose to disable that.
And, for that matter, you can also choose
not even to load this until you need it. You could always just go into Add-Ins
to do that. Anyway, let me go into Settings.
That would allow me to connect initially on Start-up if you
want. This -- now, these two here -- I want,
I want to make sure -- those of you who are security experts,
you are probably tearing your hair out right now. Hold on a second.
Allow tag deletion? Are you telling me that if I just do that then I
can delete tags? Actually, no. We have
very, you know, very robust, secure
mechanisms for security, and it's only
when you have this checked that you can even
attempt to bypass the regular -- or, not bypass
I should say -- but to attempt, you know, using the
normal security in PI, the very, you know, tightly
integrated to Windows security, to delete PI
tags. All this does is simply removes
the Tag Deletion Option from,
from being one of your choices. So, we are not saying
this is going to turn on and off security. What we are saying is
by putting that there, that's going to put the
Delete Option on the menu when you are using SMT.
And similar for Tag Creation.
Now, why would you ever want to do this? Actually, I
think I would prefer to keep that
unchecked because the consequences
of deleting PI Tags is
so severe -- I mean, in, in many cases you are basically going to do a
restore of whatever you good backup is. The consequences are
so severe, I would not want any
easy way to delete hundreds of tags. Now, I, I
would prefer that, you know, on the day I wanted to
delete a thousand tags, I would go in to
SMT, simply go into Settings,
and turn this on. I would much rather do that than,
you know, in the middle of thinking I am modifying a bunch of tags,
accidentally, you know, choose the wrong
button from a dropdown list, you know, that's
only -- they are, they are only an eighth of an inch apart. I, I do not want that
capability. Anyway, so that's up to you.
Now, some other things about this
have to do with some of our older mechanisms for
editing tags by the thousands. This PIDIFF has to
do with our VMS version of PI. This has to do with both
the NT and UNIX versions of PI, so we are going to skip over these
for right now. Of course, they will, they will document it in the Help there if you want
to see. So, I am going to go ahead and allow those
settings. Now, let me go ahead and demonstrate one of the
easiest ways to modify tags. I am going to
import my tags. This is going to be importing
from the PI Server into
into the spreadsheet and then make some modifications
and then export these back to the PI
Server. Now, a, a lot of customers have told me
in class they get confused about this import. They say,
they would say, hold on a second. Are not you importing from Excel into
the Server? Well, you know, you, you, you --
try to think of this from the point of view of where you are.
Right now you are in Excel, so what we are trying to do is import
into Excel, and then once we have done some things, we want to
export back to the PI Server. So that's what we are talking about
here. Okay, so once I have chosen Import,
I, I have a, a couple of ways I can import. I can import
all the attributes that are currently on the spreadsheet. There are none.
Or, I can just bring in everything that meets a specific Tag
Mask. Let's do that way first. I am going to look for all the Tags
that end in the
digits 158. And,
I will just bring those in. What this is going to do is bring every single one
of those Tags in and show me every single attribute.
So, here they are. There's these three Tags that we
ship with the system plus the one I created in a previous exercise.
And here, alphabetically, are listed all
of the attributes, and there's a lot of them.
As you see, we can just keeping going all the, all the way over here to
Column AX. So, there are many,
many different, different attributes that you can look
at here. These are the Tag attributes. And
just so there's no confusion over this,
let me show you -- there's, of course, a one-for-one
correlation between what you are seeing here --
for example, this Digital Tag I just
created has a Digital Set called Aset. You will see a one-for-one
correlation between what you see there and what you see over
in the Point Builder because, what we are doing is, we are just
showing you a, a faster way of editing
things.