The “Alarm Class” property of a NiagaraStation’s Alarms extension offers two options: “Prepend” and “Append”, with an associated text field for a text string. The typical application if for a Supervisor station that has many stations under its NiagaraNetwork, each using a “replicated” station database, meaning that each JACE station has identically-named AlarmClass components, along with other identical characteristics.

Consider a large “chain store” job where each JACE is installed at one retail store/building. Each JACE station has AlarmClasses named “tempAlarm”, “humAlarm”, “runAlarm”, “accessAlarm”, and so on. In the Supervisor station, you want separate alarm classes (and routing) for individual stores, so you create AlarmClass components named “storeA_tempAlarm”, “storeB_tempAlarm”, and so forth.

Now in the Supervisor’s NiagaraNetwork, under each NiagaraStation’s Alarms extension, you could set the “Alarm Class” property to “Prepend” adding the store identifier (“storeA”_”, “storeB_”, etc.), as used when creating and naming AlarmClass components. See Figure 100 for an example property sheet.

When a store alarm comes to this Supervisor, the “prepend text” is added to the originating AlarmClass in the JACE station, such that routing looks for that named AlarmClass, e.g. “storeB_humAlarm” or “storeW_runAlarm”. This allows you to maintain the original alarm class mapping (at the “store station level”) as well as segregate “by stores” at the Supervisor level.

This feature does not automatically create “virtual” alarm classes in the Supervisor; you still have to manually create all AlarmClass components needed. Also, check that AlarmClass component naming matches whatever “Prepend” or “Append” scheme is configured under the NiagaraStations in the Supervisor’s NiagaraNetwork.