Clone

Owned by Ricky Villa
Last updated: Aug 12, 2021 by Kimberly Cruz (Unlicensed)
6 min read

The concept for importing data using Clone tool

  1. Build one unique equipment by bringing in the points from your connector into an equip

  2. Perfect that one equip

    1. rename points

    2. tag points and equip

    3. add histories

    4. etc

  3. Use Clone tool for all other similar equipment

Your new equipment will have the same point names, tags, histories, etc (which is why you want to perfect the one equip before cloning) and still be relative to the equipment they belong to.

Clone

Clone tool uses one perfected equip template and applies that to however many equips from the connector a user will like to apply to when adding equips to the database. This takes care of all the tags and refs. We’ll be showing examples from BACnet and Haystack connectors.

Video examples:
BACnet Integration
Haystack Integration

Prerequisite:
One perfected equip to clone from. That means a user will bring in the points from a particular equipment. Then rename and tags the points as well as the equip. Once done, they will then use this as the base template for the Clone tool to clone to the rest of the similar equips they have.

How to use Clone

The user will go in DB Builder app.

Then, once inside the app, the user will navigate to the equip they will like to clone via Navigation Tree. They can do this couple ways.

  1. Manually navigating to equip via Navigation Tree itself

  2. Or navigating to equip via Equip Tree in DB Builder and then selecting to make it context.

Make sure the equip and points are all tagged. The points also have to be connected points from the connector.

Once that is done, the user will go the connector to clone the remaining equipment. In this example we’ll start with BACnet connector. Then the Haystack connector.

BACnet integration example

The user will go to the Connectors tree and select the BACnet root to see their available BACnet connectors on the right side.

In this view, the user will select the connectors on the right side to clone. We are using VAV1 as the base template since we perfected that one to clone from. In our case, we select VAVs 2-5 to clone and then select the Clone button.

After selecting the connectors and Clone button, a popup window of the Clone tool will appear.

The fields are:

  • Equip to Use as a Template: This is will be the perfected equip to clone from. Its automatically populated because we navigated to that equip in the Navigation Tree and setting it as the context.

  • Base Url: This is where the desired equip (from the connector) to clone will be added (Should be the same as Equip to Use as Template)

  • Targets: This is where the list of equip(s) (from the connector) to be cloned will be added

When the fields have been selected, the user can hit Create and the form will then execute the process. That’s it, now the user has successfully cloned VAVs 2-5 from VAV1 and all should be identical.

Haystack integration example

The user will go to the Connectors tree and navigate inside the Haystack connector to the parent tree that contains the equipment so that it can display them on the right side.

In this view, the user will select the connectors on the right side to clone. We are using VAV_01 as the base template since we perfected that one to clone from. In our case, we select VAVs 2-10 to clone and then select the Clone button.

After selecting the connectors and Clone button, a popup window of the Clone tool will appear.

The fields are:

  • Equip to Use as a Template: This is will be the perfected equip to clone from. Its automatically populated because we navigated to that equip in the Navigation Tree and setting it as the context.

  • Base Url: This is where the desired equip (from the connector) to clone will be added (Should be the same as Equip to Use as Template).

Haystack connector is different since there is a hierarchy within the connector. Depending on the hierarchy from where the user is trying to clone from, they can change the Base Url drop down list and pick the target they want to clone from in the connector.
For example, our hierarchy to the points being used is:
Component Space → AHU_VAV_Equips → VAV_01 → points → AirFlow
To clone, we select the parent tree that contains the equips we want to clone which is AHU_VAV_Equips.
Our base url should be the VAV_01 equip not “points” because we don’t want to clone from that level. If the “points” level did not exist in the hierarchy, then we could have used the default configuration to clone.
If we cloned from the points level, the curPath would look something like this (missing the points folder between equip and point name):
C.AHU_VAV_Equips.VAV_02.AirFlow
If we cloned from the equip level, the curPath would look something like this (correct path):
C.AHU_VAV_Equips.VAV_02.points.AirFlow

  • Targets: This is where the list of equip(s) (from the connector) to be cloned will be added

When the fields have been selected, the user can hit Create and the form will then execute the process. That’s it, now the user has successfully cloned VAVs 2-10 from VAV_01 and all should be identical.

Example

Perfect Equip Template

Here we added points from the VAV1 BACnet connector to the Vav-01 equip and tagged everything the way we wanted. This would be done regardless of any connector type.Decided to use “Vav-01” as the equip name instead of “VAV1”. Then we also tagged the VAV equip as “vav and hvac and hotWaterReheat”.

Clone tool

Here we selected BACnet root under Connectors Tree and then selected the VAVs 2-5 BACnet connectors to clone.

Clone Result

After creating the cloned equips. The user can then check that in their database. As you can see on the point, the tags and refs were added/changed accordingly.