Indirect linking using tag references

It is often necessary to relate a single document in Meridian Enterprise to several tags 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 Tag document type. The Tag proxies represent the related assets in the maintenance management system.

The proxy tags 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 tags.

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

To aid users in creating references between the proxy tags and related documents, equipment tag data contained within AutoCAD drawings can be extracted, stored in the vault as described in Configuring the AutoCAD link, and replicated to the Meridian Explorer repository. For non-AutoCAD documents, the full-text index data of documents can be scanned for tag names that match a regular expression as described in Configuring the document to tag relationships . PowerUser users can then create reference links between the documents and the corresponding tags as described in the BlueCielo Meridian Asset Management Module User's Guide.

Once the links are created, showing the linked documents in Meridian Explorer is done as follows:

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 tags 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 tags are collected and shown.