SeventyFiveF Niagara Driver: Discovering Points

Using the SeventyFiveF Niagara driver, there are four different ways to get points from the 75F cloud into your Niagara station. Any combo of these methods will work for adding 75F points to a Niagara station.

The first two are Actions on the SeventyFiveFSite component:

• Import Site Tree without Points: adds all Haystack floors, rooms, and equips to the station as subfolders under the SeventyFiveFSite's Points extension. Does not actually add any points. They can be added later via any of the other methods.
• Import Site Tree and Points: adds everything - floors, rooms, equips, and points - under the root of the SeventyFiveFSite.

The other two act on individual SeventyFiveFPointFolders. For both of these methods, it's easiest to perform an Import Site Tree without Points first, so all the folders are already created for you.

• Discover: learns all points associated with a specific room, floor, or equip. Like a normal point discovery menu in Niagara, you can then add discovered points through the Add button.
• Import Points: adds everything - floors, rooms, equips, and points - under a given node on the 75F Site tree.
  
  

Before You Start

Make sure that your SeventyFiveFNetwork and SeventyFiveFSite are online. Both should be displaying status of either {ok} or {unackedAlarm}. If not, refer here for troubleshooting.

I don't want to read all the documentation below. Just give me a workflow I can start experimenting with.

We'd recommend you try the following:

1. Right-click the Site. Click Import Site Tree And Points Action.
2. This will add the entire 75F site to your station to start. From there, drill down into the folders and start to look around.*
3. Once you've decided which points you want to keep in your station, delete the rest.

* If your license capacity is limited, you will probably have just imported more points than your station can actually read.

If you want to only bring in specific points in the future, the methods described below offer a way to do that.

Import Site Tree without Points

SeventyFiveFSites have an Import Site Tree Without Points Action. It fetches all the Floors, Rooms, and Equips in the 75F Site, then adds them as subfolders underneath the SeventyFiveFSite's Points extension.

To access it, right click the site and select Actions:

From here, the actual work is done inside a background job run by the station. When the action is clicked, a Job Progress button () and then a Job Complete button () will appear in the bottom-right of the screen. Once the green check mark appears, the job is complete.

Once the job has completed, click on the SeventyFiveFSite's Points extension. It will contain a SeventyFiveFPointFolder with all the site's floors, rooms, and equips underneath it:

From here, you can select any of the folders that were just imported and start discovering points.

Point Discovery

The Discover button on a folder works like it does for most Niagara drivers. If you click on a SeventyFiveFPointFolder, the SeventyFiveF Point Manager will be the default view. Clicking the Discover button produces a table of points:

From here, points can be selected (individually or in groups), then added to the station using the Add button:

It's important to note that the Discover button only finds the points directly under the folder that you have selected. If your folder has child floors/rooms/equips under it, Discover will not find any points that exist under those subfolders.

What does that mean? Let's find out by trying to discover points under a Zone (GarageMonitoring). If we run a Discover on it, we find only 9 points:

But, there's an Equip (MONITORING1002) underneath the Zone. If we drill down into the Equip and run another Discover, we find 15 more points that weren't discovered underneath the Zone:

The Discover button works if you know exactly what you're looking for. But, it's designed for fetching a flat list of points from a device, and even a simple 75F Site has a multi-level hierarchy that doesn't fit that structure. If you don't know which points you'd like to bring in, it's best to start with Import Site Tree and Points.

Import Points

Each SeventyFiveFPointFolder has an Import Points Action. When clicked, it starts a Job that adds everything underneath the specific folder in the 75F cloud - points, floors, rooms, and equips - to the station.

This differs from the Discover button in two ways:

1. It automatically adds all discovered points instead of having the user select which ones they would like added.

2. It doesn't stop at the given folder; it also adds points underneath all the folder's child equips/floors/zones.

As an example, let's go back to the still-empty GarageMonitoring zone. If we right-click it to run the Import Points action, we will find that the 9 points for the zone have been added automatically.

If we drill down further into the MONITORING1003 equip, we find that points were added underneath it, too. If there was another layer of sub-equips underneath it, their points would be added as well:

Import Site Tree and Points

Go to the SeventyFiveFSite, right-click, and select the Import Site Tree And Points Action. This will drop the entire 75F site -- floors, zones, equips, and points -- into your station.

This will begin a job that may take a few minutes for large sites. Once the job starts, you will see a () icon in the bottom-right of your screen. Once the job completes, it will change to a ().

After that happens, the SeventyFiveFSite's Points extension will contain all the points from the cloud Site, subfoldered by room, floor, and equip:

Even a small 75F site will have several hundred points. So, unless you are working with an unlimited license capacity, you'll need to go through the site now and delete the points you don't care about.