To put the cap on this year, we’re revving back up our “complaint of the week” series —as you may recall, this series is devoted to exposing holes in our product. While it may be a bit different for a software vendor to discuss real-life problems users encounter, we aim for a collaborative environment and want to share workarounds for common issues. With that said, we’re ending this year with a doozie…

Textual:

“I am trying to create the different specific fiber link types and would like to simply clone the fiber that is default because it has so many useful fields but when I go to manually add new TIA strands into the clone the only counts that it gives me are 12, 48, and 144. There are many more strand values available when I add a new link type but then I will not have all the other fields from cloning the fiber link type. If there is any confusion we can set up a call to further discuss what I am looking to do. Thank you in advance!”

Phew!

Ok, what do we have here? Let’s start with something more basic first.

netTerrain OSP (Outside Plant) has a few nice tools to manage your cables and strands. A fiber cable is exactly that: it’s a real cable that has a certain number of strands inside. Users in the catalog can create any number of cable types, which include any number of custom properties, visual overrides and behaviors as well as any number of fiber strands. Fiber strands, in turn, can also have properties and can be managed individually.

As I mentioned above, users can create a new cable type with any number of strands in the catalog.

Back to the problem: this user likes the fact that the netTerrain OSP catalog contains existing pre-defined cable types and the ability to create new ones with so much predefined good stuff about fiber cables and strands (properties, behaviors, etc) but, when he goes to define a new cable type, he may run into a situation in which the number of strands that this cable type should have is not an available option in the strand count drop-down box, as depicted below:

In the image above, we can see that the drop-down is missing, for example, the option for 36 strands. This is not the end of the world. The user can actually use the 48 strand option and then delete 12 for example. Or use the 24 strand option and create 12 strands manually in the catalog for that type, and then, every time an instance of that fiber cable is added to the project, those cables will automatically have 36 strands.

But — there’s an even easier way! You can simply add that 36 strand count as an option and it will sequentially and automatically create (in the catalog, mind you) 36 strands with 3 sequences of 12 strands according to TIA color codes.

To do this, just follow these simple steps:

  1. From the netTerrain installation folder find the settings.xml file. This file contains a number of interesting settings and fine tuning configurations that may not be present in the GUI of the admin console.
  2. Find the tag that includes all the strand count options, which users the key “AddLinkTypeStrandsQtyValues”.

  3. Add the strand counts you need, such as 36. Be careful with how you add this as you need to respect the syntax including the comma. And…voilà!

Now, whenever you add a new cable type in the catalog that needs to include that specific strand count, it will be an option in the drop-down box.

Happy documenting!

About Jan Durnhofer

As CEO / Product and Engineering Manager, Jan joined Graphical Networks with the purpose of creating the most advanced DCIM and IT visualization company in the market.