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Section 4.0, building
PI Tags. In this section we are going to discuss
how to build tags with the Point Builder and how to create digital tags.
I will start with creating and managing tags. All of the
tags that you ever might want to build
can be created using the tools of the
Tag Configurator and the Point Builder. We will take a look at the Tag
Configurator briefly. We will concentrate on the Point Builder because it's
the simpler of the two. The Tag Configurator
is again that graphical user interface version of
creating tags. It is built into Excel-- it's
an Excel add-in. And you simply use
this diaglog box to export the
definitions which are shown here. And since most people are
familiar with user Excel, it's pretty straight forward. You can
do massive edits this way. Now the
second mechanism listed here is the Point Builder and we are going to be spending
most of our time in that. Point Builder is simply the graphical
user interface you will find in the PI SMT console.
So if we go over to the PI System Management
Tools under the Points section, you will
find this Point Builder.
And that's interesting-- I was
in the middle of an edit. So let me be ahead
and abort out of that. I do not want to
change this tag. But this is
the Point Builder. And the Point Builder, as
you can see, it's a way of getting access to all the attributes
of the PI Tag. But it's mainly done
for one at a time types of edits. There is another
tool, it's not taught in this class, but it's piconfig. It's
the list processor. You can generate huge lists of
Tags as text files and import them
using piconfig. And there is special
piconfig scripting syntax that we have to use with that.
We do that in our System Management 2 class. There are some other tools that can be used
to create specific types of tags. For example,
with PI Auto Point Sync which
is kind of the holy grail of this type
of system in which
you simply connect up to a data source
and everything gets created automatically.
Some of our data sources support that.
We do not support a great number
yet. For those that do support it, it's a
great way to create the tags that you need.
We can also create certain tags using our Interface Configuration
Utility. Certain diagnostic
tags... Our PI Batch Generator can create tags required
for batch collection. The PI Alarm Group
Creator creates certain tags. Totalizer Editor
creates totalized tags. ACE creates
calculations. Pi PerfCreator can create performance monitor
tags. And then the PI SNMPUtil
creates SNMP tags-- tags
collected by the SNMP interface.
So the things that you see here under the heading of other tools,
that's simply those specific tools that we
have to create specific types
of, not general purpose tags, but
tags with a specific
context or specific function within the context
of doing totalizers or
calculations or SMNP data collection.