States and Enumerations

In some cases, your attributes can contain any number or value. You may want to limit the values that can be assigned to an attribute. To allow values for only a limited set of entries, you can create an Enumeration or State Set. A State Set can contain a finite number of states or enumeration values.

An example of this would be as follows:

On
Off

In this case we have two states, On and Off, and these are the only allowable values.

State Sets

In NuvIoT we will use the term State Set to define the collection of states or enumeration values and state to define the individual values.

When creating a State Set, you define the name of your state and a Key.

The Key that you provide for each state will be used to store the value of the state associated with that data item.

Integer Enumerations

When creating your State Set, you can specify if an integer enumeration value should be provided. This is useful for mapping to integer values from messages. If you specify that it should be provided, then each state must include an integer enumeration. Integer enumeration values are only provided to map to incoming and outgoing messages. The value will be converted to the string Key value prior to being saved.

States

When you define the states that make up a State Set, you need to define the following values:

Field	Description
Name	A textual representation of the state. This can be changed.
Key	The unique Key that identifies this state.
Enumeration (optional)	If you want to map this Enum value to a numeric value in your message, you can supply an integer to perform this mapping.