Indirect linking using object references

It is often necessary to relate a single document in Meridian Enterprise to several objects in a maintenance management system (or vice versa). Examples of this are:

• For each piece of equipment in the maintenance management system, display the maps or floor plans on which it appears.
• For each piece of equipment or location in the maintenance management system, display the process and instrumentation diagrams on which it appears.

To support one-to-many relationships, the Asset Management Module uses references in the Meridian Enterprise vault. These references are managed using the PowerUser extensions. The extensions create references with the TagObject reference type between the documents and proxies of the Object document type. The Object proxies represent the related assets in the maintenance management system.

The proxy objects can be created:

• Manually in PowerUser
• Semi-automatically by drawing tag extraction in PowerUser
• Automatically by periodically importing maintenance management system data as described in About importing and maintaining proxy objects.

Note    Although not often required, the Asset Management Module also supports object to object references.

The indirect linking process performs the following steps:

1. When a document is requested in the maintenance management system, integration code sends a URL to Meridian Explorer with a query string that contains arguments that identify the selected asset. For example, location=BR451&Site=BEDFORD.

2. Based on the configured filters, the Meridian Explorer properties that match the passed arguments are determined, for example, Custom.LocationCode for location.
3. In Meridian Explorer, a query is executed to find all proxy objects for which the value of the filter property matches the argument value, for example, Custom.LocationCode=BEDFORD-BR451 and Custom.Site=BEDFORD.
4. In Meridian Explorer, all documents with the reference type TagObject that are related to the found proxy objects are collected.

To aid users in creating references between the proxy objects and related documents, equipment tag data contained within AutoCAD drawings can be extracted, stored in the vault as described in Configuring drawing tag extraction, and replicated to the Meridian Explorer repository.