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So whenever we want to see data in PI
DataLink--so all this data here--it starts
with knowing what data we want to look for right?
So that comes in from
PI search. Search is what allows us to find
what data items we actually want to look at. So all this
text here and all this text down here that's all from
search. So understanding how search works and what you can do with it is
pretty important. So to demonstrate we're going to go over to a clean
sheet and we're just going to search a bunch of things and show what you can do.
So to start off with when you click on
search you're brought into this dialog.
We'll just go "home" and you'll see first off it's divided into
two types of options here. One,
these are the classic PI Data Archive
Servers. So if you want to search by PI tag
names that's where you'll want to go--you'll find your PI Server
name in this list. Next we have PI
AF which allows you to browse your PI System based
on the asset structure. So what's the form?
What's the organization of your plant? And you can find
your data through that. That's what we'll do first then we'll come back and we'll look at
some PI tags. So we click on our AF
Server and then we can just browse in
"Big Creek" is what I'm looking at--Big Creek Power
Plant--and this is the asset structure. I'm just diving in and
digging in seeing what's underneath each one and I see I
have a gas turbine here.
The gas turbine has quite a few
attributes right here.
And if I select one and say
"okay" the text of that is put onto
my sheet and it's the whole
line of...it's
the whole path to the final attribute that I'm interested in
seeing--the exhaust gas temperature of my number one probe.
Then what I can do with that is I can link
it up to a current value. So I could just link it up to
a PI tag or an output
by giving current value of that as a data
item, asking for the time and I get a data
out..pretty simple. Now if I wanted
to do the same type of search but do it for
a PI tag I would simply go to one of my
PI data archive
servers and I'm going to search for a
PI tag.
I can see that on this server I do have a couple
.. Sinusoid.. and I could also just change
what I'm searching for. So this is just like a
classic PI tag search. You can use wildcards in this field
here and you can use the same types of
restricting filters like what point type it is, what
engineering units, extended scriptor. Once I find the one
I want I'll say "okay" and again it's put onto my
sheet in much the same way--server name,
tag name--and I can open up a current
value--just click on that as a data item--and I get the
value right there.
So that's the basics of
searching. It's how you could search for a PI tag like
this or we can dive into our PI AF tree and we can just use
our understanding of how our plant is organized to
find the attributes that I want and I don't need to know all the
PI tag names.