Okay now let's see what happens when I select multiples of these. So if I select a couple of
them--like how about all four of these probes because I want to know all four of them. Well
when I select all four and say "okay" all four are put onto my sheet. I'll just move these to
a nicer spot right here. And then what I can do is I can do the similar kind of thing where I
will ask for a current value and I can just ask for all of them, hit "apply" and I'll get all
the current values for each one of these. Now one thing that might come up for you is you'll
look at this and be like, "Geez! That's a lot of text!" and a lot of it's repetitive and it kind of
disguises the one thing that's different between all of these. Is there a better way to do it?
There is a different way to do it so let me show you that that I think you'll like a lot. So we'll
select the same four and this time we'll use this root path link slider and move it over and what
it does is it defines a separation point right here between what we call the root path--that's
maybe the part of the path that's going to be repetitive or be the same-- and then the
data item--so that's probably going to be more related to the actual attribute you're looking
for. We'll say "okay" and then it's put onto our sheet as two cells-- two separate cells. See?
So we've got the root path on this side and we've got the data item on this side. Let me write that
in so we can remember it. "Root Path; Data Item". What you can do with this is now I can use this
root path option in any of my queries and all of my queries have root path options. Click
in "root path", click on your root path. Click in your data item, click on this range of data
items and we'll say "apply" and we get the same values. See...same values but this query here
is referring to one root path and then a couple of data items. I don't even need all of these;
I can delete the other ones because I'm just using that one on top. And then I can probably
move around my cells to be a little more organized on my sheet and I only have one. Okay now here's
where the really cool part comes in; if you've built your tree to have this sort of structure
where there is a whole root path in you'll notice if I go back to Big Creek Power Plant
I don't have one turbine I have three turbines. Maybe I want to be able to switch between viewing
one or the other, so, what I can do...all I need to do now is just go into the root
path and change it. Change something about the root path and the values down here will update.
We can do the same with PI tags; you could put the PI Server there but often we find
customers are only using one PI Server usually but you might have multiple PI Servers and you
could put them in this spot here to refer to different PI Servers. And then the data items
will refer to the particular PI tags that you're interested in. We can also do something called
a drop down list. Let's say I'm searching in Big Creek and I don't really even want to be
diving in but instead I want to be searching for something. So I want to search for the exhaust
gas temperature--all the attributes that say "exhaust gas temperature". When it comes back
I can see this has retrieved a whole lot of sets of exhaust gas temperature--one through four,
one through four, one through four, for different gas turbines. So we can see gas turbine one and
gas turbine two are both represented here and what I could do is maybe I want to see all
of these and I want to see the root path as a separate item so I'm going to slide
all this over and then if I say "root path" in drop down list let's see what happens now.
We say "okay" and only-- since a lot of those attributes were repetitive--it only put in one
copy of each and then on top here there is a drop down list where now we can click on different
items and it will automatically update. So what this looks like is I can click on "current value",
I can click in "root path" and refer to this cell--A23-- and data items--A24-27-- and I'll
say "okay" and now I can just click on my drop down list and my to a different turbine just
like that. The real power now is that we can use our asset tree to create very powerful
spreadsheets to minimize the amount of data we need to put on any one sheet.
We don't need to load an entire sheet with a whole bunch of data,
we can just ask the PI Server for it on demand when we need it. This means that our spreadsheets
will be smaller, more portable and will be more consistent and will fork less easily.