Patch Panel, Chassis, and Device Views

Patch panels, chassis, and devices are typically mounted onto a rack (devices can also be stand-alone).

IMPORTANT: Patch panels are composed of cards, and cards are a collection of ports. In day to day practice, your company might not use the concept of cards. Perhaps all the technicians care about is the port number on the panel itself. That’s OK. If this describes your company, you can simply have a single “card” for an entire patch panel. The panel itself would have a single row and a single column, and then the card would have the appropriate number of ports (with the appropriate number of rows and columns) for the entire panel. If you are wondering if you can simply skip the card altogether, for all intents and purposes, the answer is no. Even if your company doesn’t take advantage of the concept of cards, they are still a component of the data model.

Patch panels, chassis, cards, devices, and ports follow the grid rules outlined in the topic Populate Rack, Device, and Port Fields.

This topic focuses on their rack position.

Rack Position

In Fiber Manager , patch panels and devices are managed in non-spatial object tables (called F_PatchPanel and F_Device in the sample data). These object tables have a field to store the rack position. This field is called RackPosition in the sample data. The name is up to your company, but the important thing is that it is the field assigned the FIBERGRIDPOSITION field model name.

For example, imagine three patch panels on a single rack:

Panel 1 is at the 3rd rack position.
Panel 2 is at the 9th rack position.
Panel 3 is at the 15th rack position.

To achieve this, in the ArcFM Attribute Editor, edit the RackPosition field to place each panel in the appropriate position.

In the Wavepoint rack view, it appears like the following image:

Rack Position Irregularities

The best practice is to ensure quality data by verifying rack positions in the field. But, if there are irregularities, Wavepoint still attempts to render the rack view in a useful manner.

If a panel or device is missing a rack position or if a rack position does not make logical sense, Wavepoint follows a “best fit” approach in a bottom to top, left to right manner. For example, if the same three panels had null positions, it appears like the following image:

Notice it positions them starting at the bottom and stacks them accordingly.

It does the same best fit approach if not enough room is given to the panels. In other words, if these panels were set to position 1, 2, and 3 respectively (but each panel actually occupies 5 slots making those positions impossible), it displays just like the image above.

Using the same setup as above, now let’s say there is a device set to position 6. There is clearly not any room at position 6, so following the same best fit approach, Wavepoint places the device as close to position 6 as possible, then bumps up the remaining panels:

In short, the best approach is to correct these irregularities with proper positions. But, know that Wavepoint still attempts to render the rack view in a useful manner.