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Anonymous
September 6, 2016
Solved

Category metadata on Properties, Services, and Events

  • September 6, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 1763 views

Very simplified quick background: My company basically sells a Thingworx extension.

I am considering a design that utilizes the Category metadata field on a Property, but it would render the Category unusable (or best case less-usable) for our own customers on properties that we are defining in or creating from our package. So I am looking to find out how all of your fine folks may be using the Category field. I've never had a use case for this before so I have not spent much time thinking about it may be useful, especially given that the Composer help text states

Property, Service and Event definitions support the concept of categorization, so that you may order them in logical groupings when accesssing them for scripting.

(Also, just saw the spelling error on "accessing" at least on 7.0.3. Oops Composer team.)

So, if you are using Category on Properties or Services or anywhere else that metadata field might exist, let me know the how or why so I can consider my future customer's needs.

Best answer by Aanjan

Jason, from my usage perspective, adding Categories to, say properties, makes it easier to find it (or atleast makes it look organized) when creating/ adding Services. For example, if I have 50 properties on a Thing, going through the Me tab (on a Service) when trying to add certain properties might take longer (of course, using the search to type and find the property name is the quickest/ easiest). If I add Categories on properties, they would show up under a new Category section; a subsection under the Properties section.

And on a side note, I'll see if I can get the typo fixed as well.

1 reply

A
Aanjan5-Regular MemberAnswer
5-Regular Member
September 6, 2016

Jason, from my usage perspective, adding Categories to, say properties, makes it easier to find it (or atleast makes it look organized) when creating/ adding Services. For example, if I have 50 properties on a Thing, going through the Me tab (on a Service) when trying to add certain properties might take longer (of course, using the search to type and find the property name is the quickest/ easiest). If I add Categories on properties, they would show up under a new Category section; a subsection under the Properties section.

And on a side note, I'll see if I can get the typo fixed as well.

A
Anonymous
September 6, 2016

I did not know that they showed up like that in the Me tab for service editing. Wild. I do think that pushes me away from using that method for storing property metadata, I'll have to use tags or something. Thanks for your help!

If you have any weight on future design, I'd love for us to be able to add our own metadata (maybe custom Aspects) to properties, services, that simply come along for the ride and can be queried against. A simple key value pair array or something would be awesome.

A
Aanjan5-Regular Member
5-Regular Member
September 6, 2016

No problem! I can certainly run by any suggestions you may have with the devs and get back to you with any thoughts or feedback. Actually, if you create a case, I can add an improvement Jira so it gets 'officially' added to our design queue for the devs to review and possibly implement.

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