Any detriment to using verbose tag names/paths?

Ignition
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I’m trying to determine if there is any detrimental effects of using verbose tag names and paths verses more succinct ones, for example imagine I have a number of data acquisition units with diagnostics, and my tag paths end up being:

Diagnostics\Data Acquisition Unit\X\Environment\High Temperature

Versus something like

Diag\DAU\X\Env\HiTemp

  • If there are a lot of tags like this on a page, is one preferred over the other?
  • Is there an effect on page start-up time (Vision or Perspective)?
  • Does this dramatically increase the size of logs (I don’t think so, but just to check)?
  • Is there a higher network load on the OPC-UA server?
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I recommend using full words, or nearly so, with no spaces or punctuation. (Basically, names that work as programming variable names.)

I recommend avoiding repeating words towards the leaf that are in folder names.

But most important, be consistent. This is crucial for constructing user interfaces with re-usable windows/templates/views/popups.

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Always appreciated for your insight Phil, but do you have any information on the performance aspect of this, aside from the “best practices for maintainability”? I agree with your recommendation 100%, just want to know if, for example, I have 500 tags on a page (Vision primarily, in some form or another, driving indicators, hidden, etc. as a worst-case), if one is better than the other?

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Not that I know of. Certainly not for tag bindings (subscriptions). Possibly a slight impact of system.tag.read*(), but I wouldn't expect that to be an issue short of tens of thousands of tags in a single read.

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What Phil said, but don't go overboard.
Windows (sigh) has issues with file paths longer than 255 characters. This starts to become relevant in Ignition 8.3, where tag configuration is stored in a series of flat files on disk that reflect the same hierarchy as your tag organization.
C:/Program Files/Inductive Automation/Ignition/data/config/resources/core/ignition/tag-definition/default/Diagnostics/Data Acquisition Unit/X/Environment/High Temperature is 170 characters.

As far as I remember, Java/Ignition handles these long paths okay, but the rest of the OS, including literally explorer.exe, starts to behave very strangely.

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Thanks Paul, luckily in our case all of this will be on RHEL, but it’s good to know of the quirks. You’d think by Windows 11 they would have fixed the 255 character issue better than they have...

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I prefer object then descriptor ie Temperature High. It's far better for sorting, similar to date formats in file names (yyyy-mm-dd)

This doesn’t surprise me unfortunately… just like Microsoft's failure to programme competent search algorithms in its products

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Yeah, this helps with the alphabetical organizing especially with some devices like our flowmeters

Flow_Alarm_Hi
Flow_Alarm_Lo
Flow_PV
Temp_Alarm_Hi
Temp_Alarm_Lo
Temp_PV
Pres_ 
DiffPres_
....and so on