# Adding Column to Historical Data Table

**URL:** <https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/adding-column-to-historical-data-table/22192>\
**Category:** Ignition\
**Created:** [January 29, 2019, 4:12pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/adding-column-to-historical-data-table/22192 "2019-01-29T16:12:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![fred.berryman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/3ab097/32.png) [@fred.berryman](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/fred.berryman)\
**Post date:** [January 29, 2019, 4:12pm UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/adding-column-to-historical-data-table/22192/1 "2019-01-29T16:12:44Z")

</div>

Is there an easy way to add a column to a table that is bound to Historical Tag data? The problem is that the Tag Names don’t mean much in plain english. I’d like to add a human friendly description to each tag if possible (for example “Pump 1”, “Pump 2”…etc).

What would be even better would be if I could bind the new column to the “documentation” field of the historical tag’s realtime counterpart.

The tags in the table don’t need to be historical, but I couldn’t find a way to easily add multiple realtime tags. I understand that the way to do this would be through creating a dataset, but I haven’t got that far yet. The fields I’m interested in are name, value and documentation (description).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![MMaynard](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/inductiveautomation/user_avatar/forum.inductiveautomation.com/mmaynard/32/3366_2.png) [@MMaynard](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/u/MMaynard)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2019, 1:49am UTC](https://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/adding-column-to-historical-data-table/22192/2 "2019-01-30T01:49:34Z")

</div>

[https://ideas.inductiveautomation.com/ignition-features-and-ideas/p/history-tag-alias-field](https://ideas.inductiveautomation.com/ignition-features-and-ideas/p/history-tag-alias-field)

This has long been a desire of ours as well.  
We actually coded a workaround that grabs the active tags from sqltags\_te, then uses the tag paths to grab the toolTip field values for each tag, write this dataset to a dataset tag and then coded a custom tag browser tree to utilize the toolTip text in place of the tag paths.  
Its a ton of code that would easily be replaced by an alias field on the history tab. ☹