A Node is unique and defined by its Id.
You can have the same Node (defined by the same id) present in several stations. It is very useful when you want to have the plain view of your model across all of your stations.
For example, let's consider a Supervisor, dedicated to the building "Building A" and 2 JACEs, each on a floor ("Floor 1" and "Floor 2"). You would need to have the Node "Building A" in both JACEs, because you need to set the Nodes "Floor 1" and "Floor 2" as a descendant of "Building A" and as well in the supervisor because you want the bigger picture. So "Building A" needs to be recognized as unique in the three stations, this is done by its id.
But, now, let's take another example. Let's say you have been programming your site with a supervisor and 2 JACEs and now you have another project independent from the previous one. The new site also has "Building A", "Floor 1" and "Floor 2". They are completely different buildings and floors. If you want to copy-paste the Nodes from the first stations to the new ones, you need different ids. Because, if you connect both sites to an hypervisor (a supervisor of both sites), you will have a conflict. (If you do it, you would have to create a new NodeDefinition, "Site" for example, and link each building to a different site in order to have both "Building A").
So in order to get different ids, we've created a Workbench command called "Paste Model". If you copy-paste anything in the model: Aspects, NodeDefinitions or Nodes, you will have to use "Paste Model", instead of the usual paste command.
It will open a Popup asking you to chose if you want to:
- Create new Nodes: this will reset the id of every Node you copy-paste
- Duplicate Nodes: this will keep the same ids, meaning that, the Nodes will be identical.
You can also check what happens at a station level, when you duplicate a station. You can always use the action resetId available on Aspect, NodeDefinition and Node.