4.3.5.8. Equipment Hierarchy and Containment

IRM supports several types of parent-child relationships between Equipment objects:

An Equipment object can be inserted into a Rack.
An Equipment object can be placed in a Slot.
An Equipment object can be a component of another an Equipment object. While being placed in a Rack or Slot indicates an exact physical relationship between the objects, being a component is more abstract and is useful in cases where more exact information is not available.
An Equipment object can be a peripheral of another an Equipment object. While a peripheral is often not literally contained inside an Equipment object, IRM still considers a peripheral to be part of its parent's containment tree - in this context, "containment" means more of an ownership relationship rather than physically being inside.

Software objects can be assigned to Equipment, by either pasting the specific Software, or the Software Type object under the Software field in Equipment Properties General tab.

Note that if an Equipment object is in the containment tree of another Equipment object, it's own children are considered to also (indirectly) be in the parent's containment tree.

Each Equipment instance contains a special tab in the Equipment Properties dialog for viewing its child objects - the Containment Tree tab:

The following are this dialog's main features:

The tab contains a single tree with a top level node for each type of child Equipment installed in the current Equipment (Rack Equipment, Slot Equipment, Components, Peripherals)
Each child node (child Equipment instance) has the format <name> (<type name>), which can be changed to the format <name> (<Category name>) by clicking on the Show Category / Show Type toggle button in the top-right corner of the dialog.

There is no edit capability in this tab; it's just for viewing

The Show Category / Show Types toggle button in top-right corner changes the displayed info from the format:

<Equipment name> (<Equipment type name>)

to the format:

<Equipment name> (<Equipment by function Category name>)

Example Show Type: for a rack would look like "DC01.A01 (Rittal Rack 24x24x42U)",
Example Show Category : the same label would look like "DC01.A01 (Racks, Cabinets & Frames)"

The following sub-topics cover the basics of Peripherals, Components and Rack child Equipment, while Slot Equipment is covered in more detail in earlier in the documentation.