What is the difference between STREAMS and PROPERTIES in Thingworx?

[rrzink91]

I couldn't find any specific post in regards to my question, so I did research on the two subjects individually.

STREAMS - time series data (timestamp and additional data)

• has a list of activities from things or data associated with things
• thought of as a table structure with five predefined fields and any number of user-defined fields:
  1. timestamp
  2. tag
  3. source
  4. source type
  5. location

PROPERTIES - how you describe the data points that are directly related to a thing. Each property has a name, description and a data type 

Note: Any informative feedback to my question would be greatly appreciated. Thank you and have a nice day!

[PaiChung · Accepted solution]

Properties are modeled definitions of a 'Thing' - Asset. For example a Car might have speed, temperature, miles as properties and at any given time it will be able to tell you what the speed temperature and miles traveled is after the latest value update.

A Stream (and ValueStream) is a way to store time series data historically.

So let's say you want to have the speed profile over time of a car, you store the speed values in the Stream or ValueStream

The way Stream and ValueStream differ is that ValueStream works 'automatically' by setting a property to Logged, whereas for a Stream you fully define what you store and you have to have an event (usually datachange) to trigger a service that stores the information.

So a ValueStream can log upon valuechange automatically let's say speed that changes over time and miles traveled over time.

then what you might do is that based on proximity you might create a Stream (not valuestream) entry that says, at this time, the car was close to this city speed was ... miles travelled was ...

More info:

http://support.ptc.com/help/thingworx_hc/thingworx_8_hc/en/ThingWorx/Help/Composer/DataStorage/Streams.html

http://support.ptc.com/help/thingworx_hc/thingworx_8_hc/en/ThingWorx/Help/Composer/DataStorage/ValueStreams/ValueStreams.html