About Discover in Bacnet Export Manager

You typically use Discover in the Bacnet Export Manager, vs. New and/or Match. When you click Discover, the Bql Query Builder dialog appears, as shown in Figure 82.

Figure 82. Discover yields Bql Query Builder

See “About the Bql Query Builder” in the Drivers Guide for general information. Relative to usage in the Bacnet Export Manager, this dialog lets you find and select components in the station to export (expose) as BACnet objects.

You can export these component types (Also see Types of objects for Bacnet export):

Any components sub-classed from BooleanPoint, EnumPoint or NumericPoint, (including Writables) meaning the following types:
- Any proxy point that is not a StringPoint or StringWritable, under any driver.
- Most kitControl components that have a null ProxyExt—this includes all Math and Logic components, for example. Typically, you export these as a “value type” object (Analog Value, Binary Value, Multistate Value). Note that you can export a LoopPoint as a BACnet Loop object. Again, kitControl objects subclassed from StringPoint (string Output) cannot be exported.
Any Niagara Schedule component except a TriggerSchedule (no BACnet object equivalent).
Alarm Class components (under the station’s AlarmService), which export as BACnet Notification Class objects.

Therefore in the Bql Query Builder, type selections other than Control Point, Boolean Point, Enum Point, Numeric Point, Schedule, and Alarm Class have no practical application.

As with other manager views featuring online discovery, “Learn Mode” in Bacnet Export Manager has two panes:

Top (discovered) Local Objects pane—listing components found from your last Bql query.
Bottom (database) Export Objects pane—listing components currently exported to BACnet. These are special “export descriptor” components—each essentially a pointer to the exposed Niagara component, with additional slots that determine how BACnet access/writes are handled. See the next section, Add (and Edit) in Bacnet Export Manager for more details.

When exporting, the manager automatically performs “object ID maintenance” on exported components, ensuring that no duplicate combinations of object type and instance number are created.