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Cross Cutting Concerns

Event Tagging

In an edge solution, it is likely that several instances of EdgeX are all sending edge data into a central location (enterprise system, cloud provider, etc.)

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In these circumstances, it will be critical to associate the data to its origin. That origin could be specified by the GPS location of the sensor, the name or identification of the sensor, the name or identification of some edge gateway that originally collected the data, or many other means.

EdgeX provides the means to “tag” the event data from any point in the system. The Event object has a Tags property which is a key/value pair map that allows any service that creates or otherwise handles events to add custom information to the Event in order to help identify its origin or otherwise label it before it is sent to the north side.

For example, a device service could populate the Tags property with latitude and longitude key/value pairs of the physical location of the sensor when the Event is created to send sensed information to Core Data.

Application Service Configurable

When the Event gets to the Application Service Configurable, for example, the service has an optional function (defined by Writable.Pipeline.Functions.AddTags in configuration) that will add additional key/value pair to the Event Tags. The key and value for the additional tag are provided in configuration (as shown by the example below). Multiple tags can be provide separated by commas.

    [Writable.Pipeline.Functions.AddTags]
      [Writable.Pipeline.Functions.AddTags.Parameters]
      tags = "GatewayId:HoustonStore000123,Latitude:29.630771,Longitude:-95.377603"

Custom Application Service

In the case, of a custom application service, an AddTags function can be used to add a collection of specified tags to the Event's Tags collection (see Built in Transforms/Functions)

If the Event already has Tags when it arrives at the application service, then configured tags will be added to the Tags map. If the configured tags have the same key as an existing key in the Tags map, then the configured key/value will override what is already in the Event Tags map.