Associating the Derivation Group with a Plan
Now that we have some External Sources uploaded, we can utilize them within a plan to see them on a timeline (and in the future, use them to power constraints, dictate scheduling goals, etc.).
Creating a Plan
Start by going to the Aerie Plan page:
Once there, create a new plan with the following parameters:
To create this plan, make sure that there exists some mission model that can be associated with the plan. The exact model is, at present, entirely unimportant as it has no bearing on External Events functionality. The mission model used here, arbitrarily, is that of Aerie's mission model template.
After the plan has been created, select the plan on the table to the right, and then select Open plan in the pane on the left. You should be presented with a plan view that resembles the image below:
Select the External Sources tab on the left, and you should see the following:
This panel tells us that there are no derivation groups currently linked to our plan, meaning the external events we uploaded before are not yet associated with it.
Associating the Derivation Group
There are currently no Derivation Groups associated with this plan! While we should have one created, there aren't any that this plan is aware of. To change this, we need to click Manage Derivation Groups, to open the Derivation Group management modal.
Once here, we can now look at all of our available (currently only one) Derivation Groups and select which ones to associate with our plan. Association implies that the plan or at least the plan page is in some way aware of the fact that this Derivation Group exists (details on what exactly association entails can be found here under 'Derivation Group Management Modal').
In the Manage Derivation Groups modal, check the check-box for our Derivation Group (DemoType Default). The check-box itself does not do anything yet, it requires the Update button at the bottom of the modal to be clicked to 'save' the linked/un-linked derivation groups.
Click the Update button to link the derivation group.
The modal should now appear as below, with a success toast in the bottom-right corner of the screen:
Leaving this modal, it should now be present in the External Sources tab on the left.
On the left-pane, we can see the breakdown of External Event Counts - where the Derivation Group is shown to have 4 derived events which come from the two sources, External_Events_Demo_00.json and External_Events_Demo_01.json, that both have 3 raw events (or, un-derived. The External Event counts on External Sources represent the amount of present in the file itself, with no derivation or filtering applied).
Creating an External Event timeline row
Now that we have a derivation group associated with our plan, we can put those external events on the timeline to visualize them.
By default, a dedicated 'External Events Row' is not created unless the user loads a plan that already existed and has at least one derivation group previously linked. In our case, because this is a new plan we must create our own row to see the events. Alternatively, a filter for the event types can also be added to a pre-existing row.
First, switch to the Activity, Resource, & Event Types tab.
Click on the Events tab in the pane. The external event types from the example events should appear inside of the pane - these can be dragged to pre-existing rows to add as a filter, or by using the + icon when hovering over the type entry.
For this tutorial, we'll create a new row entirely. We can expedite the process by using the Add Filter to Row button at the top of the pane, and then clicking the New Row + button at the bottom of the list. This will create a new row, with all available external event types included.
We can now see our example events on the timeline! There are 4 derived events shown, these represent the set of events that are derived from all the sources that exist within the derivation group.
In the next section, we'll look at the options available when editing a layer on the timeline.
Editing the External Event timeline layer
Clicking the three dots on the bottom right of the layer and then clicking Edit Row will bring up the layer timeline editor:
External events appear in the same layer type as activities, and as such share options with them inside of the timeline row editor.
Additional Resources
More detail on the topics discussed in this tutorial can be found under External Events