Global Aliasing Overview

Global Aliasing is a GENESIS component that allows you to design your project more efficiently by configuring data sources using placeholder variables.

By using global aliases, you can make your project more scalable and adaptable. Common uses for Global Aliases include reducing the overall number of objects in your displays, reducing the number of displays by creating templated displays with aliases, and making interactive displays with greater ability to support user actions.

How it Works

Much of the configuration of GENESIS involves using the appropriate data source. Whenever you need to select a data source (such as in Asset Properties, GraphWorX data sources, Data Historian tags, or many others), you will be presented with a data browser to select the source and receive the "data source”, which is a unique string representing the path to this data. With Global Aliasing, you can replace some or all of this data source with placeholder aliases instead to allow for greater flexibility.

A global alias is a placeholder you can place into a data source or configuration whose value can be updated in runtime based on user-definition. The term “global” is referring to its scope that works across GraphWorX client applications as well as server-side components such as Alarming and Data Historian.

Common Places to Use Global Aliases

You can use global aliases for the following purposes:

• To replace some or all of a data source

• As a variable in a parameterized data source, for example in Database Connectivity or BI Server

• As the file name of an embedded GraphWorX Viewer control or in a Load Display Command

• As a value to be passed to an embedded or popup GraphWorX display

Setting and Using Global Aliases

Global aliases work through a combination of two configurations working in unison:

• A place or places in your project that make use of the alias syntax

• A configuration or command that sets the value of the alias

Together, Global Aliases provides a layer of abstraction in the project design that enables you to change some aspects of the configuration at scale, and potentially in runtime.

Configuring Global Aliases

You can use two methods to define global aliases:

• Dynamic definition

  You can create a new global alias name directly in the configuration at the time when you want to use it. Learn more

• Workbench configuration

  You can define a list of alias names and possible values in Workbench, and then select the desired ones from this list during configuration. Learn more

Example Use of Global Aliases

Your project may have Assets configured with consistent asset properties that you may want to use.

You can see that these individual data points are quite similar, varying only slightly in the distinct Tank number of the asset. When you apply global aliasing, you can instead subscribe to the following:

By restructuring your point name to use a global alias, you now have the freedom to set this value as needed through Commanding. This allows you to create a single templated view of similarly structured data and easily set the appropriate alias value when used. Furthermore, this approach may aid the scalability of the application as it intrinsically supports additional data points in the future; in this example, you can easily add Tank 04, 05, and 06.