Child Devices

Overview

Child Devices are a general modeling primitive in Xyte. A child Device can be any Device type — Physical, Digital, or Application.

Parent–child relationships let you express hierarchies such as:

A control Device that manages a set of directly connected sub-Devices and communicates on their behalf.
Multiple applications running on the same shared physical hardware.

There are two patterns for setting up the relationship:

Control parent — the parent registers each child on its behalf.
Smart child — the child registers itself and declares its parent.

Control parent

The Physical Device registers itself via Register Device API, then registers each child via Register Child Device API.

Each child registration uses the parent's identity:

The URL deviceId is the parent's id from registration.
The HTTP Authorization header is the parent's access_key.

When the parent is claimed, all of its children are claimed automatically into the same End Customer organization and Space.

Children appear as normal Devices in the platform — each with its own Telemetry, Incidents, Configuration, and so on.

Notes:

Children do not need a Hardware Key. Use the Model ID found in the Device Model's Info section instead.
Children inherit the parent's hub_url for all Telemetry traffic.

Smart child

A Physical, Digital, or Application Device can pass a parent_id parameter on its own Register Device API call, binding it as a child of that parent.

The parent must be a Physical Device. The parent and child can belong to different Device Models, even from different manufacturers.

How the parent_id (the parent's uuid) reaches the child before registration is up to the integrator. For Application Devices, the parent typically supplies it during installation.