This is a useful trick for rolling up metrics in Thingworx across various levels of a hierarchy by using Networks, ThingShapes, and recursive service definitions. Say that you have a hierachy of Things in your model such as a Global view, a Region view, and a Store view -- this could be a Mfg Plant, a Building, an Asset, etc; whatever the core metric producing Thing is in your model -- where your Store has KPIs that you want to roll up across regions and globally. First, create a template for each of your hierarchical levels. In my case it is a GlobalTemplate, RegionalTemplate, and StoreTemplate. Add a property to your StoreTemplate that will be the KPI. Now, create a Thing for the Globe, and each of your Regions and Stores. Add them to a hierachical Network as such: Now, we need to create a ThingShape to aggregate our KPIs and apply it to the Global, Regional, and Store template. Now we will define a recursive funciton on our ThingShape called GetKPI and define it with the following: //define our base case, when the thing template we are on is the lowest level of our hierarchy, in this case the StoreTemplate if (me.thingTemplate == "StoreTemplate") { //in our base case, the result is just the property for the metric we want to aggregate result = me.someMetric } else { //otherwise, we are at some other level in the hierarchy and we need to get our child connections from the network //this gets all the things below us in the network var params = { name: me.name /* STRING */ }; // result: INFOTABLE dataShape: NetworkConnection var network = Networks["Network"].GetChildConnections(params); //loop through each of the things below us in the hierarchy and recursively add the result of GetKPI() to our result result = 0; for each (var row in network.rows) { result += Things[row.to].GetKPI(); } } This is a simple case of just summing up a single property, but we can take this further using the Union and Aggregate snippets provided by thingworx to do other kinds of summarization. First add a new property called someAvgMetric to our StoreTemplate, and define a new service GetKPIProperties as such, with an InfoTable result, on the StoreTemplate varparams = { propertyNames: {"items": ["someMetric", "someAvgMetric"]} /* JSON */ }; // result: INFOTABLE dataShape: "undefined" var result = me.GetNamedProperties(params); Now, define a new service on our ThingShape to utilize this service as our base case, and aggregate the resulting InfoTable when necessary. We'll call this service GetKPIAggregates: //define our base case if (me.thingTemplate == "StoreTemplate") { //this function will be on the StoreTemplate, and returns the base infotable result = me.GetKPIProperties() } else { //grab our network var params = { name: me.name /* STRING */ }; // result: INFOTABLE dataShape: NetworkConnection var network = Networks["Network"].GetChildConnections(params); //need to create an empty infotable to union into. I glossed over this, but you'll need a datashape here //create empty infotable var result = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].CreateInfoTableFromDataShape({ infoTableName: "InfoTable", dataShapeName: "KPIDataShape" }); //loop through and union each of our results to our new infotable for each (var row in network.rows) { var params = { t1: result /* INFOTABLE */, t2: Things[row.to].GetKPIAggregates() /* INFOTABLE */ }; var result = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].Union(params); } //aggregate each of our fields var params = { t: result /* INFOTABLE */, columns: "someMetric,someAvgMetric" /* STRING */, aggregates: "SUM,AVERAGE" /* STRING */, groupByColumns: undefined /* STRING */ }; // result: INFOTABLE var result = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].Aggregate(params); //need to loop through each of our field names and make them match our base infotable // infotable datashape iteration var dataShapeFields = result.dataShape.fields; for (var fieldName in dataShapeFields) { var stringName = dataShapeFields[fieldName].name; var params = { t: result /* INFOTABLE */, from: stringName /* STRING */, to: stringName.split("_")[1] /* STRING */ }; // result: INFOTABLE var result = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].RenameField(params); } } Now, in our mashups, we can use a DynamicThingShape and call our GetKPIs service at any level in our network, and our data will be aggregated correctly for whatever level we are at in the hierarchy!
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