If your control
system is fortunate enough to have
what's called BES, or Batch Execution
System functionality, then you will not need anything
on the PI side to generate your Batch records.
The Batch records and all these,
all the hierarchy and everything will be generated by the
control system, and we will just have to read a Journal File
through one of our special interfaces.
However, most people do not have that
luxury. Most people need
a mechanism or functionality in order
to generate their Event-framing data.
And, for that, we give you the
PIBatch Generator Interface. It's commonly referred to in OSI
as PIBaGen. PIBaGen
watches what are called Trigger Tags or
Active Points, and when that Active
Point tells us so, that means
a Batch has started. We will watch that, and that same
Point will tell us when it ends. And that will allow us
to create Batches and UnitBatches and PIBatches
and all that good stuff. The
PIBaGen, or Batch Generator Interface,
can monitor multiple Active Points
for SubBatches and UnitBatches and all that, so
you can have a lot of Batches going on
on your PI Server as you are collecting data.
The PIBaGen
is normally run as a Service. Now, this is
installed as a Service on your system,
and if I were to go into Settings and Control
Panel and Administrative Tools and Services --
the Services applet is in, in a different
place on different operating systems --
but I am on an XP system. I am going to
scroll down until I find Batch Generator Interface.
And you will see that it is installed but it is set
to Manual even though the other PI Systems are Automatic.
And I will have to change this to Automatic
before I start this up. Now, like every
other interface, we have to make sure the inter-
face is configured correctly. And,
that is done by looking at
the Interface Installation folder. By default,
that's the PIPC Interfaces and
PIBaGen folder. So, we would have to look in that
folder and configure the interface
before we were to start it up. If we did not,
we would get an error message and it would not start.
And, we are going to have to look in the -- if,
if we got error messages, they would be in the PIPC.Log file.
All the information for PIBaGen
is stored in the PI Module Database.
In order to configure the Batch Generator
Interface, we are going to have to do a couple of things first.
And the very first thing you should do is
you should check the Batch File for the Interface
and make sure it's configured correctly. And
I will show you what I mean by that. I will open up my
computer and I will go to Program
Files, PIPC,
and Interfaces. If you remember,
this is where all of our interfaces are installed
on the PI Server, or on any machine.
And you will see the PIBaGen folder. And what I want to
do is I want to check this Batch File and make sure it's set up
correctly. And, what you are going to
find is that the Host Name
is set to Local Host. And,
it -- that's because we do not
know what type of or what
the name or, or location of your Server is.
Now Local Host used to work on order versions of the PI Server,
but since the platform release 1
and the high-availability functionality,
Local Host is not allowed any more. So, I am going to
need to put a Host Name in there for
my machine. So I am going to change Local Host
to Train56.
That's the name of this machine. Now, in many cases,
this file is going to be read-only, so you
may have to right-click and select Properties
and make sure that read-only is not one of the
attributes checked. I think I, I, I have looked
at this before and so I took the read-only marker
off it. But, I think, by default, that it's, it's going to come
read-only. So, you want to change that. And then you are going
to want to -- you are going to want to save your file.
So, you are going to want to save your Batch File.
And now, now that I know the
Batch File's correct, we can
try to start it up through our Services
applet. So I can go to the Services applet, and I
can go to Batch Generator Interface, and I can select Properties.
I want to make sure this operates
on an Automatic basis from now on, so I will change that,
and I will start the Interface. And,
if I want to check to see if
it started up correctly, I can go back
to my PIPC Folder,
look inside the .dat or Data Folder, and
find the PIPC.Log file. I will
scroll all the way to the bottom of that file because
this, these files are appended, and you can see
that my Interface
did see the correct Server. It did see my Server.
It did start up. It did open a connection. And,
what it says is it could not find the Module
OSI-PI.BaGen. This is because there's
one more step to configurating,
configurating this Interface, and that is to set a
Module Name in the System Manager Tools. So, if I
go into my System Manager Tools, I
connect to my PI Server ex...--and Batch, and go
to Batch Generator. You will see that there are
is UniBatch, SubBatch, PIBatch and Interface.
You will need to configure the Interface Section here
in order for this to work