Thing Hierarchy Best Practices

[yoprado]

Hello,

We are trying to implement a hierarchy where a piece of equipment will be split up into assemblies and sub assemblies. What is the proper way to implement this? How does asset advisor or Manufacturing apps do this on the back end?

Is it best to split them up into separate things? from a data visualization standpoint, they should all stick to the same "thing."

What our current thought is that we have a thing per equipment and then group up sets of properties in different data shapes. Is this an appropriate approach? In order to check if the property is part of a datashape though, we have to use queryImplementingDataShapeWithData which could be performance intensive as it has to check security for every property. 

What is the best approach going forward here? Is there a process to categorize properties within a thing itself?

[PaiChung]

It depends one the use case.

You can go with

Networks - especially when you have interchangeable parts and each piece is monitored as a whole and as a separate entity. Networks will give you pretty quick ability to go up and down a network to find relations and do aggregations. Also allows for nice display in a Tree widget

as you mentioned Properties this can be done either as single properties or an infotable property. can pretty much mimic what networks do except for Tree Widget display

Model Tags - this is for something that is very loosely associated and swaps a lot but wouldn't use this if you need to associate strongly and derive or aggregate information from each piece

DataTable - my least favorite it isn't 'Thing Centric' or holistic, also can become very big and 'unwieldy'