Collection: Sort by attribute value

• What specific problem are you trying to solve with this enhancement?

  • We have to display Hydro power plants in the order they are installed on rivers. Each power plant is represented by an AF element derived from a "Power Plant" AF Template. In the AF Template, we have a Power Plant Order info. In the attached screen capture from a PI Vision Display, we could not use collections because we could not sort on the Power Plant Order attribute

• How would you like this feature to work?

  • Have a sort item in the collection configuration pane, and allow to select an attribute from the template to sort ascending or descenfing on it.

• Who will benefit the most from this enhancement?

  • All our PI Vision users (>1200)

1. What specific problem are you trying to solve with this enhancement?

   1. Manufacturing data isn't sorted alphabetically. Manufacturing data is sorted by God only knows how many methods, but rarely alphabetically. Data is sorted by alert/alarm priority, by equipment or instrument number (and since 9 comes after 10 alphabetically, that's a problem), by which equipment is furthest upstream, by live numerical data (I may need to look at whichever reactor has the longest batch time or something or which asset has the most active alerts), by the timestamp in which data was received, by gut feel and habit, by names the equipment used to have but doesn't any more, by equipment nicknames, by anything other than the alphabet.

   2. Frankly, the fact that collections can only be sorted alphabetically has been a major limitation to Collections for years. We've had to work around this limitation by putting unnecessary prefixes before element names( e.g. "(01) Reaction", "(02) Distillation", "(03) Utilities"), or by using multiple collections to try and break a larger collection into smaller ones (say, by filtering one collection to "Only show if Alert Attribute is Critical", and then another collection for "Only show if Alert Attribute is Warning", and stacking them on top of one another), or by telling people "Sorry, the collection is just going to be out of order", or by just not using collections when the lack of sorting is too great a limiting factor.

   3. By allowing us to create attributes which can be used to define the sort order independent of the name of the element, it opens up a ton of use cases and time savers. We can do this manually via non-historized attributes or programmatically via PI tags or analyses.

2. How would you like this feature to work?

   1. Ideally, something like the Sort function in excel, where I can specify multiple sort criteria and prioritize them. However, even just being able to right click the collection, go to "Format Collection" or "Edit Collection Criteria", and choose one attribute to sort by would be great. I'm guessing it should look at the Attribute's Value Type and base the sort off that. Also, giving us options to sort ascending or descending would be great too. It shouldn't be required to be one of the filtration attributes, so we should be able to select the sort attribute independent of the filter attributes. It should be able to work with non-historized attributes (such as those manually entered) or by attributes that are PI tags. As the values changes, the sort should change without having to reload the page (some displays are put up in control rooms on big TVs and just left there). Probably put some kind of rate-limiter on there, so noisy or erroneous signals don't cause the collection to constantly shift. Maybe let us define the rate-limiter (like an option to say "how often do you want to update?") in the collection's configuration. Or, let PI Administrators configure that somehow. Actually, probably need to give PI Admins an ability to set a limit on how often collection sorting can occur on all of their displays too.

3. Who will benefit the most from this enhancement?

   1. Operations and Manufacturing personnel that need to see data sorted by some other priority than the name of the element. This could be the timestamp that data was received, or magnitude of a signal, or count of alerts, or severity of alerts, or by equipment number, or some other convention. The more flexibility that is enabled, the more solutions we can create.

   2. Engineers and other PI designers who are creating displays and modifying AFs. Now, we don't have to come up with element names different from what we actually want the asset to be called to accommodate only being able to sort by the alphabet. That's actively interfering with the good maintenance of Asset Frameworks. Also, it allows us to make displays with the power of collections without any awkward qualifiers like, "I'm sorry this isn't sorted the way you think it should be, but it's the only option we have".

1. What specific problem are you trying to solve with this enhancement?

   1. Always sorting a collection by the asset name is not desirable. Custom sorting based upon state of an asset or an attribute allows for custom arrangement, such as the physical layout of assets on the manufacturing floor.

2. How would you like this feature to work?

   1. Collection criteria would have option to sort by name, description, element attribute value.

3. Who will benefit the most from this enhancement?

   1. End users desiring to see assets in a certain arrangement or priority.

   2. Developers wanting to leverage collections for ease of development and management but needing to have custom arrangement of assets on the display

1. What specific problem are you trying to solve with this enhancement?

   1. Collections already provide so much value for our organization, monitoring similar assets (pumps, refiners, tank levels, etc.) and applying filters to view only problematic assets. By adding a sorting feature, we can further highlight the most problematic assets first, bringing greater attention to them and leading to quicker actionable insights.

2. How would you like this feature to work?

   1. Simply add the sort option to the existing "Edit Collection Criteria..." menu. Select an attribute from element template (aka Asset), then choose whether to sort assets by ascending or descending order of the attributes value. See attached image for a mockup.

3. Who will benefit the most from this enhancement?

   1. Operations and maintenance managers who want to quickly assess what equipment requires immediate attention.

We have developed lot of PI Vision Dashboards based on collections feature. These Dashboards help our Users to perform Exception Based Survaliience (EBS) for Wells, Rotating Equipments and etc. Sort by attribute value feature will help in som many ways. Example: In the dashboard if we have filterd the wells which are opened but not flowing due to some issues. In this case we we can sort the Wells based on thier potention production. So with the Sort by attribute value feature we can display wells based that Users can prioratize the wells

1. We have many assets in sequence and the only way to properly order the assets in PI Vision is to prefix with a letter or number. For example, I have washing displays where I want to show the complete wash sequence despite the unit operations being in differ parts of the plant. PI Vision forces me to add an ordering prefix to the asset name (1.Digester, 2.Diffuser. 3.BSW. 4.Decker...). The ordering prefix means other displays also include the ordering prefix which make no sense to the user.

2. An item in the collection configuration defines the attribute to sort by.

1. What specific problem are you trying to solve with this enhancement?

The problem is that collections that are ordered strictly by element name are not particularly useful when you have a large number of items. Allowing the user to be able to specify a sorting attribute would allow the user to have specific control over which items show up at the top of the list! This can be critical for quickly honing in on the most useful pieces of information; this is already possible for asset / tables ��� but not with collections (which allow much more customization)

1. How would you like this feature to work?

Add a field on PI Vision when configuring collection for ���sorting��� ��� Ascending by Asset Name, Descending by Asset Name, or by a specific Attribute Name (and allow user to type in that attribute name or select from a drop down that���s populated by the template attributes)

1. Who will benefit the most from this enhancement?

Both developers and pi vision users will develop from this enhancement because it will 1) be easier to create customizable, collection driven items that still hone in on the most important information and 2) users of pi vision will be able to quickly narrow down issues that are occurring.

1. Dynamic organization of a collection instead of static by element name

2. An item in the collection criteria that specifies an attribute and it's value(s) to order the elements in the collection

3. Us

Collections are becoming increasingly important in our organization, this would be a great and essential feature to add. UI/UX could be similar to the attribute filtering; choose which attribute to sort by and then select ascending or descending order.

This would be a very valuable feature that could quickly improve the utility of several of my displays. Please make this a priority.

I would also highly appreciate this feature so that we can be more flexible when sorting collection items / assets. Because currently you need to stick to the name which is sometimes not really the natural sorting (process flow, etc.).

It should be no big deal to implement as attribute information is already available, it just needs to be utilized.

This would be a extremely useful idea when required to present data in a league table type presentation.

In response to Keilan Knight, "I'm surprised how many down votes this h..." I think there is a bug in how PISquare is interpreting votes and what is actually on the feedback site

I'm surprised how many down votes this has received? I'm wondering if its possible to write this functionality ourselves easily? We are using collections for nice lists (the asset comparison table is good, but still a bit limited) The problem is, we'd like the sorting to match the hierarchy, lets say Element1 has child elemehts A B and C, and Element 2 also has A B and C but may also have a D E and F aswell. The collection is grouping all the A's, grouping all the B's, but we want to see Element1 > A, B, C then Element2 A,B ...... (contrived example but you get the idea!)

In response to Vincent Kaufmann, "I think there is a bug in how PISquare i..." Ahh ok that makes sense then

This definitely needs to be an option in future releases. Currently the random sort makes the awesome power of the collections very difficult to view when setting up a display for 28 different sites. In our case we would like to sort on a Site attribute so that we could view the data for our plants in alphabetical order. Or an option to sort on the parent element would be nice too.

We really need this. Currently we are dismantling collections more and more to have control over the sorting. And then while the Collections are one of the best features in PI Vision!

our use case is to show the health values of assets. The desire is to sort from the 'sickest' asset (highest value) to the least, so you don't have to hunt through what could ultimately be several hundred pumps and motors. Thanks you soooo much for considering this in the next release ;-)

Yes, sorting by attribute value and also by the full path string would be quite useful.

This is essential to be able to undertand your TOP 10, TOP 50, TOP X assets or worst assets, based on an attribute value, without having to look at the full collection to search for those assets. Basically, this would be to have a similar functionality than the Asset Comparison Table symbol, for which you can order the rows by the values of the various columns you decide to display.