A Guide to Effective Grouped Histories

A month ago I posted about the benefit of using grouped histories. This post will be a guide on how to effectively make those groupings. For reference I am using Honeywell Optimizer 4.15 workbench, but the steps should be good for anyone using any flavor of workbench above 4.8 or so.

We’ve talked about how not grouping histories leads to endless lists like those show on the left that have to be scrolled through forever, versus nice clean grouped histories show on the right.

---

Step 1

Start by going into History Grouping within the History Service and adding a new “History Group”

We can give this grouping any name, and this will be the name of the subfolder under histories that groups all the histories by these properties. For a nationwide system it might make sense to start the grouping by state and city, but if the system is a single building you might only want to start with floor or equipment type.

---

Step 2

Now that the grouping is created, we need to look at how to apply these properties to our individual histories. The easiest way is to have a template that is already made for each type of history extension (Numeric Interval, Boolean COV etc.) and add those each into new point as they are created.

For this post we will show how to create these properties from scratch using a Numeric Interval history extension right from the history palette.

The properties we want to create that can be used to group the history need to live under the “History Config” slot in the history extension. There are already some pre-built slots under history config right out of the palette, but we need to add some custom ones to make the grouping work.

In this picture I’ve added a Numeric Interval history extension to a space temperature point and have gone into the slot sheet view of its History Config. Here we can add a new slot of type “baja” and subtype “String”, and give it a name that matches exactly one of the properties that we made in step 1. We also need to check the “Metadata” box.

Once we have created the slot, going back to the property sheet view of the history config we see that there is another open field that we can enter text into.

---

Step 3

Now that we have a property we can use to group this history, let’s see what the history tree looks like :

Because we only have one property assigned, the history will show up under the highest level property folder that there is a match for.

---

Step 4

Now that we know the grouping works, we can start adding more properties under the history config:

As we add more properties that have a match for the groupings we made, more subfolders start to appear in the history list:

We can see that the top level grouping is determined by the text in the “State” property under history config. Any history that has the “Maine” text in the state property gets shuffled into the “Maine” folder, and then gets further sorted from there based on subsequence properties listing in the grouping.

It gets a little clearer when we add a second history into the mix where the City and Building properties are different. They still are grouped under the “Maine” subfolder, but now that they have different text in those other property fields, a new subfolder is made for each of them.

Be careful with what text you enter into property field, as the system matches text exactly and doesn’t catch when you misspell “First” as “Frist” so you’ll end up with two subfolders.

---

Step 5

Once we have the properties made in the history config of all the points, we are not stuck grouping them in just one way. In this step I created a 2^nd grouping that only groups them by State and Equipment properties:

When we open up the Group2 history folder, we see that things are grouped only by those two properties.

Creating the properties at the history config level is definitely the most time consuming part of this process, but I’ve found it’s much easier to copy and paste from one that you’ve already made, or have template history extensions that you can use. Here’s an example of a template one that I’ve made for my own programming uses that I drag and drop onto new points as I make them:

If all your points in a station have these fields already made, it’s simple to use the batch editor to quickly enter in all the info at once.

Using the batch editor to accomplish tasks like this will be the topic of my post next month.

Matt Swan