A device is any electronic equipment or other data source configured and controlled by Tibbo AggreGate. The "representation" of device within AggreGate Server is called Device Account.
AggreGate Server works with different types of Devices using Device Drivers. These drivers know how to "talk" to a certain device using its native protocol. Every Device Driver provide a normalized representation of one or more Device as Contexts. This normalization process involves several steps:
| • | Creation of one Device Context per every Device that works with AggreGate. |
| • | Conversion of Device internal settings and configuration options into context Variables (Properties). |
| • | Conversion of control operations supported by the Device into context Functions and corresponding Actions helping to execute these functions interactively (Call Function actions). |
| • | Conversion of events generated by Device into context Events. |
All these operations help to provide unified methods of Device configuration, control and monitoring within AggreGate infrastructure. When a Device is represented as a context with variables, functions, and events, you can use all of AggreGate's management and monitoring features (Alerts, Reports, Widgets etc.) to work with it.
Device-Provided Data
Every Device provides some or all of the following data objects:
| • | Settings that are available in the form of Device context variables. |
| • | Operations available as functions of Device context. AggreGate Server also creates one action per every device operation for convenient interactive or non-interactive execution of them. |
| • | Events, i.e. events of Device context. |
| • | Groups for building logically grouping settings, operations and events into hierarchical group tree. |
Administering Devices
Two contexts are used to administer Devices: One is the general Devices context that acts as a container of all Device or a single user. The other is the Device context, corresponding to a single Device. There are two additional contexts related to Devices: All Devices context under the User context and All Devices under the Root context. These contexts provide access to grouped actions for all Devices belonging to a particular user account, and all Devices in the system, respectively. |
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