The Situational Awareness Starter Project provides a set of sample equipment templates to help with creating equipment. The equipment template is an XML file that uses proprietary tags and attributes to specify the fields of input and output databases, and define filters and transformation rules that create tags from existing database fields. It uses the existing TagGen syntax rules.

As part of creating an equipment template, you need to tailor the equipment templates to suit your physical device. You may need to complete one or more of the following tasks to create a custom template:

1. Define Equipment Types.
2. Add items to the equipment types.
3. Configure custom parameters for each equipment type. Parameters defined here would typically be the same across every instance of a particular type of equipment. For example, range of values for the equipment or alarm names and their default values.
4. Create custom tags, if required. You may want to define custom tags (parameters) that may be different depending on the type of equipment. For example, the address or engineering units for different types of meters. In this case, you can define custom tags in Citect Studio.

Note: By default, the sample equipment templates use analog alarming limits. If you wish to use PLC limits with equipment, see Associate PLC Limits with Equipment.

Create the required equipment instances in Equipment Editor based on Equipment Types.

An equipment hierarchy provides a model of a plant that can be used to reference the machinery or processes being monitored.

In the case of a Situational Awareness project, equipment definitions are used to drive the functionality that enables a runtime system to respond to the current context of a display client. They can also support navigational features and area-based security. For examples of an equipment hierarchy, click here.

When you configure equipment instances for a project based on the Situational Awareness Starter Project, you should pay particular attention to the following Equipment Properties:

Property	Description
Display Name	This property allows you to create a meaningful variation of an equipment name that can be easily accommodated in the runtime interface.
Type	This property specifies the Equipment Type that is associated with a piece of equipment. In a project created from a Situational Awareness Starter project, a set of default equipment types are available to support the Composite Genies that are in the SA_Library include project. You should select the equipment type associated with the Composite Genie you will use to create the graphic object for the piece of equipment. For example, if the piece of equipment is a pump, you will be able to create the associated graphic object using the Drive Composite Genie. The equipment type you will need is drive.
Page	This property associates a piece of equipment with a page, that is, the primary page on which the associated graphic object appears. If the graphic object appears on more than one page, the page specified here should represent its primary operational context. This enables an operator to navigate directly to the page that hosts a piece of equipment. For example, on an alarm page you can navigate from a selected piece of equipment in an alarms list directly to the page on which it is displayed. This property is also used to calculate alarm counts for a page in the Navigation Zone. Note: If a piece of equipment does not have the Page property set, it will not be included in the alarm counts for its host page. For more information, see Enable Navigation Zone Alarm Counts.
Content	This property allows you to associate the piece of equipment with a particular type of graphical content (see Content Types). For example, you can associate a pump with a drive faceplate ("FP_DOL" or "FP_VSD") or an area with an overview page ("Area_L1"). You can specify multiple content types for each equipment definition using a comma-separated list. When the piece of equipment comes into context, any panes that are set to autofill will read this property. If a match is made, the pane will display the specified content. For more information, see Autofill.
Tag Prefix	This property is used to apply a prefix to any variable tags associated with the equipment. This is useful for the creation of the variable tags required to support a Situational Awareness Project.
Area	In a Situational Awareness project, Areas are used to manage user access and privileges at runtime. Use a area number (or label) to assign the equipment to a particular area. Only users with access to this area (and any necessary privileges) will be able to perform operations on the equipment.

If you are creating a new Situational Awareness project, after you have created your equipment hierarchy, you need to generate variable tags for the equipment .

Note: Tags generated this way are read-only, that is, their values cannot be updated in Citect Studio.

If you are upgrading a previously created project, and would like to use the Situational Awareness Genies with tags in the old project, you will need to migrate the existing tags.

To migrate existing tags:

1. In the Equipment Editor, build your equipment hierarchy in the right pane. To do this, right click and select New Equipment. The Add New Equipment dialog box is displayed.
2. Specify the Name and Project.
3. Leave the Type as "No type".
4. Click OK.
5. In Citect Studio, navigate to the System ModelActivity. Select Equipment.
6. Use the column filtering options to filter the tag names for a piece of equipment.
7. Add the equipment name as specified in the Equipment Editor in step 2.
8. Add the item name for the equipment. Items Names should be the same as the Items displayed in the Equipment Editor, Equipment Types tab.
9. Create the required graphics pages with the equipment instances.
10. Configure the required content types.