I've mentioned several times that one of the benefits of
using AF within ProcessBook is as a navigation tool,
to find specific entries
in AF, and then display them in ProcessBook. So, let's
just demonstrate that real quick. I'm going to build a brand new display.
And let me just maximize
this. And what I'd like to do is add, oh
let's just add a, a Value.
This is a Dynamic Object, a Value, and
like all of our Dynamic Objects, including the Trends and the Bar
Graphs, etc., you'll find that you can do a Tag Search
but you can also do an AF Search. Now, we
support both the current Version AF2, and we have
a previous Version of AF, the AF Server that we can browse
through. In this case I'm going to choose
the most recent Server. And now,
this should look familiar. This is what we've been working with for most of our
class. I can go out and look for, for example,
the Mixing Tank. If I'd like to look at what Products
in the Mixing Tank, Mixing Tank, I just drill down
to the Attribute I'm interested in,
Product. I can choose an optional Unit of
Measure there. And, I'll just go ahead and display that.
So that's showing me, for this particular Mixing
Tank, Mixing Tank 1, that's the Product.
Now you do have the option to put a label on here. I want to warn
you about the labels though. The labels are
pretty darn big, so even if I --
let me go ahead and format this a little bit better. I'll go into
the Arrange Menu and I'll align this to the left.
And we're still -- so we see this is the
Value right here, and the
Name is awfully long, so -- what
we're seeing though, is that is the Value for Mixing Tank 1.
Now, there is an
option that you can suggest to your users, which
is they just hover if they'd like to see more about
the Object, so you don't necessarily have to include
this Tag Name.
So, as you can see, because of the context involved,
it can get very long. But, if you just hover, you can see exactly
what, what it is you're looking at there.
Now, this Value here was just a simple reference to an AF
Attribute, but, I can go out and get
Data References to tables that are in Relational Databases for
example. I'll go ahead and, and do that right now.
We can also put this in Trends and Gauges as I mentioned.
We'll look at that last. So, if I go into AF2,
let's look for the Density. If you recall, Density was
a result of a Look-up Table, and
there's the Attribute right there. I go ahead and select that,
select the Unit of Measure,
and there's our Density. Now,
when, when I had retrieved that first Value
I could have just used that Value to retrieve Density as well.
I can just hold down the Control key in ProcessBook,
grab and drag that, and it duplicates
it, and then just go in here and modify this. As you can
see in the Definition, all we're doing here is making references.
So those references can be changed by hand.
If I decide to switch over to Density here,
now we're seeing that Density Value again.
Now when we -- and by the way, when I chose
Unit of Measure here, if you'll recall, I had the
choice of Unit of Measure. It's not going to necessarily show
me that Unit of Measure, but it will do the Conversion for me.
So, if we're talking about Kilograms per Cubic Meter, we
get one Value; Kilograms per Liter --
as you can see we're going to show that as
a different Value. So, that's the effect of that
Unit of Measure. And, one more thing
to demonstrate. Of course we can't trend all these. We can use the
traditional Tools in ProcessBook. So, for example, I
can do an ad hoc trend. It's not a very interesting
Tag because it's, it doesn't really change,
and, either -- actually I can just do a brand new trend
and make reference to something that's a little
big more active, like, if you recall, when
we were looking at our Mixing Tank. we had a
measurement of both the Mixing Speed
and also the Temperature. So, I can go out and,
and drag, or bring these into the, the
trend by going out and searching for them. We got Mixing
Speed. Now, let's look at Temperature.
And, as you can see,
now they're being brought in in real time. Now there is
an option when we did that -- , here we can see this a little better.
There was an option when we did that
to simply go out and use the PI Point directly,
in which case I'll show you what we return.
We just return the direct link to the PI Tag
on the PI Server.