Traffic Lights

Traffic lights display as a coloured dot next to each asset in the asset hierarchy. Each traffic light has:

  • A Name
  • A Description
  • A Value Field
  • An optional Colour Field, which is an Asset Information field used to give the colour of each traffic light dot.
  • An optional Hint Field, which is an Asset Information field used to give the text that is visible when a user hovers the mouse over a traffic-light dot.

If you don’t set a Colour Field, you can configure a series of traffic light colours in the bottom half of the dialog. These will then be used to give the colour for the traffic light dot for each asset, by comparing each of these rows to the Value Field for each asset. If your Value Field is numeric, you can use the Min Value and Max Value fields to set the colour. If your Value Field is an alphanumeric, you can use the String Value field to set the colour. The Name you set for each row will be visible in the Traffic Light legend at the bottom of the asset tree. Use the Order field to control the order that items appear in in the legend.

If you don’t set a Hint Field, the Value Field is used for the hint text.

It is common to centralise all the Asset information fields you plan to use for traffic lights on the Traffic Light asset information form. This allows you to glance at all the traffic lights for a given asset at once.

(Note that because the Traffic Light field must be calculated for every asset, NEXUS IC may be slower with a traffic light turned on than it is with no traffic light turned on. However, since NEXUS IC caches results, this slowness should only be visible the first time you view a given group of assets.)

Permissions

You can set permissions on traffic lights, to control which users and groups have access to display which traffic lights.

Edit a traffic light, and click on it Permissions tab. Click Add. Under User / Group, pick a user or group. Under Permission, set a permission. The user or group you select will now have that permission applied: if you select Read Only or Deny Write, the user (or group of users) will be able to use that traffic light, but not edit it. If you select Read/Write, the user will be able to use that traffic light, and also edit it. If you select Deny All, the user will not be able to select the traffic light for viewing, nor edit it.

Be sure not to deny access to all users, or you’ll wind up with a traffic light no-one can delete. See Security for more on how different permissions interact.

This is an optional feature — if you set no permissions, all users will by default have access to all traffic lights.