This is my mixing tank 1
display that I made in a previous video with a lot of
my dynamic values removed. In the other
video I was drawing values,
clicking where those values should go using this pull down
menu to search my AF tree, finding
my element and my elements
attribute. Hitting OK. And then using the
format painter to borrow the format from a
different value. In this video I'll be populating
my display with values in a much
faster way by using the AF browser and the AF property
window provided that you've developed your PI Asset Framework.
I'll also be creating a new display
that I'll make my assigning a collection of symbols to
an element or element template and then quickly dragging
entire elements from my AF browser onto my screen.
So the first thing to do is to view the
AF browser.
Here once you are connected to your PI AF
Server and your PI AF Database, the element
tree will appear down below. Next we'll view
the AF property window and it
will appear over top. But we can drag it and
dock it somewhere else. Or simply dock it
underneath. And the AF property window will
represent the properties of whatever element we have selected in the
AF browser. For instance clicking on mixing tank
2, I can see all of mixing tank 2's attributes down below.
So what I'm going to do now is select
mixing tank 1 and find the product
value and then simply drag it onto my
screen to populate it. Now I'll use this
value to format paint it.
And then repeat the same process for volume.
Now I'll do my in and outflow
at the same time.
And I can even do
trends using this method. So here is my internal
temperature and pressure trend. So what I'll do is
find my internal temperature, drag it onto the
trend. And then they'll find pressure and just stack it on
top. And this trend will accommodate
both those values. So this is a great way to
get attributes on the screen for a single mixing tank
display because I can just throw our attributes onto the screen
quickly. But what if I want to create a display that
showed information for multiple tanks at the same time?
Wouldn't it be great if I could drag entire elements onto my screen
one after the other? So what I'll be doing
next is to create a symbol that I can
assign to my tank template so that I can actually drag out
all four of my tanks onto a tank overview display.
So the first thing to do is
make a symbol work assigning to a template. So
I'll convert this into a symbol. So I'll
remove the logo. This is a
static label and I want a generic
symbol. So I'll delete this too. The diameter height
and volume don't change very often. So they aren't going to be
useful for an overview display. And now I'll
take the rest of these symbols and make them a
little bit more compact. And I'll remove my
legend and title from my plot.
And then make use of all
my whitespace.
Now I'll add a background to make it all come
together.
And we'll make it
grey and send it to the back.
And then fix the backgrounds of
my other symbols.
Alright now I can
select everything and drop my
text down a little bit in size. I'll make it bold so that it's easier to
read. And then here we can
group it together and then shrink it down
to about a quarter of the screen because I want 4 tanks on my
screen at the same time.
So what we are going to do now is take this
symbol, right click on it and
assign the symbol to the template. This will assign
the group symbol that I have to a particular
template. Alternatively I can assign a
symbol to an element. Element assignments
will always take precedence over template
assignments. Additionally if your element that you want to have a
symbol for doesn't have a template, it will be forced to assign
the symbol to the element in particular and not the template.
So here I'll click assign symbol to
template and I'll assign it to my generic tank template that all
my tanks are using.
And then I'm met with this pop
up window. So this says the template already has a
symbol associated with it. So it's important to know that
symbol assignments are PI database wide.
So anyone else who is also making
element and template assignments will either overwrite me
or be overwritten by me. So I have to confirm
that I want to overwrite whoever worked on it last. So
I'll hit yes. And now we can go and make a new display
and we'll call it our tank overview display.
So we'll view our AF browser again.
And we'll view the
AF property window again.
And now we can simply drag mixing
tank 1 onto the screen.
So this produces the symbol
that we assigned to the template and it will automatically
assign mixing tank 1 that I dragged out onto it.
Since mixing tank 1 is assigned to this
symbol, we can leave this part of the
display and if we want to find anything
assigned to mixing tank 1, we can right click and
locate it. And the display will pan over and
select the symbol that's assigned to mixing tank 1.
This can be useful when you have a cluttered
display or you haven't gotten around to producing your
labels yet. Speaking of labels, let's finish
making our display and then quickly make the labels
automatically. We'll drag out storage tank
1
and mixing tank 2.
And storage tank 2.
And now I'll close these to get my real estate
back. And just
rearrange these to make them more appealing. So we can
have these over here.
Now to automatically produce my labels, I'll
select my symbols. Right click and
add AF label. I want to add
the element name to the top of my symbols.
So I'll hit OK. And I'll just
select my labels. We can change them all at the same
time. And I'll move them over to the top
left corner?
So now we can see how quickly
you can build up a display using assigned symbols
in the AF browser window. And you can even see that there are
multi state symbols were preserved through this process.
Now if you don't have your PI Asset Framework
built out yet, you can still make use of the drag and drop functionality within
PI ProcessBook using something called
data favorites. So here in
view, data favorites, we
can search for PI Points directly.
So what I'll do is search for anything
with tank 1 in the descriptor.
This will produce my 10 PI points
associated with tank 1.
So I'll hit OK and they'll appear
in the search results window. The search results
window is going to be cleared out
every time I close PI ProcessBook. So to make them
persist, I'll have to drag them down into my favorites
window. So I'll include
my flow rate,
my pressure,
and the other flow
rate and my internal
temperature. So let's go back into our mixing tank 1
display and populate it using our data favorites instead.
So file, open,
mixing tank 1.
And now I'll just drag these value out
onto the screen. But first I'll make sure I have the appropriate
symbol selected here. So I can choose between
bar graphs, trends, values and X Y plots.
So my inflow and my outflow are going to be values. So I'll
select value. And then we'll drop flow rate
here and the other flow rate here.
Of course we'll format paint
them so we don't have to go through all of that
again. And now we'll drag
our pressure and internal temperature onto our
trend just like before.
But you'll notice that we don't have any
PI Points for height, product and volume. This is
because these element attributes are defined
only in our PI AF Database. This combined with the
often unfriendly nature of the PI Point naming
conventions really highlights the value you get out of a
well constructed AF Database.
So far in this video we made two displays
by dragging assets and elements out from the AF
browser and AF property windows onto our display.
So now we can see how quickly
displays can be built up using our asset
framework within the PI ProcessBook. Or by using the data
favorites window if you haven't yet developed your PI Asset Database out there.