This is one reason why I’m really big on “create equipment from thing” (I guess they renamed that to “add equipment to model”. In one go you get the Equipment Group Item created and made a member of the right Location Group and you have one form to create all the Items linked to the Thing’s Channels. You just need to select the Channels and set the usual Item stuff like Label and the Point semantic tags. It greatly reduces the amount of time required.
Let’s say I want to add the UV readings from OpenWeatherMap.
First navigate to the Thing and open the Channels tab.
Create equipment from thing, select the location and all the Channels.
Often the binding will supply reasonable semantic tags, label, and other Item settings so you could just accept them as written. But if you want to customize something simply edit the fields in the form. For example, in this case, it only supplies reasonable semantic tags for the first day. So let’s fix the second day’s semantic tags. Except for the Item name, you can change anything later on.
Once everything is as you want, create the Items. I fixed the categories and added Status/Timestamp to the date Items and Measurement/Ultraviolet to the index Items. The date Items already had time as the category and I added sun as the category for the index Items. I was happy with the labels and the Item names. The whole effort took under three minutes.
Create the Items and show they exist and are part of the model.
In under five minutes I created a Group (the equipment), made that Group a member of my root Location in the semantic model, and created and configured 12 Items which are automatically members of the Equipment Group. Because everything is semantically tagged, these Items automatically show up in the Overview page.
Hmmm, that doesn’t look great so next I would go and fix those Item labels to make it more apparent which Item represents which day. It pays to spend a little more time on that Item creation page. I’d probably eliminate the DateTime Items entirely. I don’t need them. But if I had a use for them, I’d set their visibility to false. I’d install List Item Widget for OpenUV Binding [4.0.0.0;4.9.9.9] and apply that to each of the UV index Items as the “default list item widget” which will change how they appear on that card in the Overview tab.
Let’s say I hate what I’ve done and want to start over. It’s super fast to delete the Thing and the Items and the Links.
And now they are gone. You could keep the Items or delete them. I usually delete them. Now they are all gone and I can redo it all in one go without needing to navigate to each and every Item.