Fiber Sides and the Patch Panel Connection Report

When you run a Patch Panel Connection Report, the report displays the connections on the various sides of the fiber components. Most typically, it displays the front and the back sides. The following image shows the back side (B) of Rack #4, and on that rack, you see the back sides of the patch panels, their cards, and their ports.

All fiber objects that can be displayed in the Patch Panel Connection Report have a field typically called “Sides.” Technically, the name is up to you and your company. What the application looks for is the field that has the field model name FiberFacetsContainedBy for the child objects, and the field that has the model name FiberFacetsContained for the parent object. It is within this field you list the sides that should appear on the report. In the image above, all those objects have at least the letter “B” in that field.

• The field can contain multiple letters. Each character is considered an entry. For example, if you want to see both the front and back of a patch panel, you would type an F and B in the Sides field, as shown in the following image:

  

• The card on this panel would also have F and B, because typically you want to see both sides of the card:

  

• However, when you reach the ports, the back side ports only have B and the front side ports only have F.

  

F and B are common examples, but the entries in the field can be any number of characters. For example, if you had a multi-sided splitter, the input port could have RLTB for Right, Left, Top, and Bottom. Then, for the particular output port sides, they would get one of those same entries. In this manner, the report would know which output ports were on which sides of the splitter, and it would organize them logically in the display.

For the report to display properly:

• The letter in the child’s Sides field must be present in its parent’s Sides field. Using “B” as an example, to see the backside of a port, the port needs B, the card needs B, the panel needs B, and the rack needs B. You cannot see the backside of the port if you are unable to view the backside of any of its parents in the hierarchy.

• The field accepts any number of characters, but each character is treated as an individual entry. In other words, “R” is sufficient to represent the “Right” side. If you typed the word “Right,” the application would treat that as five individual entries: R, I, G, H, and T.

• You or an administrator can save the most typical arrangement in the fiber favorite. For example, if you wanted to see both the front and back for the most typical rack in your system, you can save FB in the rack’s Sides field in the fiber favorite.

• An administrator can associate this field to a drop-down domain. This would ensure you do not accidentally type in a value that is not recognized or included in parent objects.