Absolute and relative references

You can use absolute or relative references to refer to application components, such as graphic displays and tags, when building FactoryTalk View commands or connecting graphic objects to process data.

Absolute references work like file paths. Relative references work like file names.

Absolute references

point directly at a specific component, by referring to the component’s name and the area (or areas, in the case of nested areas) in which it is located. For example, an absolute reference to a graphic display called Detail in an area called AssemblyLineNorth is

/AssemblyLineNorth::Detail

.

An absolute reference to an application’s root area does not include the application’s name, even though the name is shown in the root area in FactoryTalk View Studio.

Relative references

point at a component relative to the current server or area. For example, a relative reference to a graphic display named Detail is simply the display’s name

Detail

. When a relative reference is used, FactoryTalk View assumes that the component is in the current area.

Use relative references, for example, to reuse component names in a network distributed application for a plant that has identical production lines. Such an application might contain different areas to represent each production line; however, each area would contain the same component names.