Not Every Asset Should Be A Source
ARDI is a very open system, meaning that it's possible to go off in the wrong direction. When we see these issues, we like to document them to help others avoid problems.
One thing we've seen some users do is make every asset that needs external data into data source. For example, the user created 10 items that read data from a single OPC-UA server, and had set up each one of them as its own distinct data source.
This is not the way ARDI systems are intended to work.
One thing we've seen some users do is make every asset that needs external data into data source. For example, the user created 10 items that read data from a single OPC-UA server, and had set up each one of them as its own distinct data source.
This is not the way ARDI systems are intended to work.
It's important to remember that there should only be one data source for every source of data. You should create an asset that represents your OPC-UA server (for example, you could call the asset "UA Server") and it should be the only asset that is a Data Source connected to a particular OPC-UA server.
This is important for many reasons...
* Connecting to the same data source multiple times is a waste of computing power and network bandwidth,
* When changes occur, it's much simpler to update a single asset rather than many,
* ARDI assets are expected to combine data from multiple systems - if we forced you to link each asset to a data source like this, it would be impossible to mix data.