Access Control Overview

Events used with MIP-AC are the ones well known to a given access control system, like “Door-opening” or “Door-being-unlocked”. Other events within the XProtect software, such as user-defined events or input activation events are not mixed in with events described here.

States hold the state of a specific unit, like “Door-open” or “Door-is-unlocked”.

State changes are often a result of an event, but a state also has a ‘start’ value when the system starts up.

There are built-in events and states in MIP-AC, but each AC plugin specifies what is available for its individual system. This also covers the situation where different versions of an access control system have different sets of events they can trigger.

Events and states should come directly from the access control system whenever possible. If it is possible to receive the supported list of events from a system, the MIP-AC plugin should ask for these during initial configuration fetching. If not possible to ask the access control system, the plugin will need to have a compiled list included in the AC plugin.

When many events are available, it can be a big task to configure alarms and actions. To solve this issue, event categories allow you to group a number of events into a category, and let the administrator configure alarms and actions based on the category, rather than configure each and every event individually.

Some event categories are built-in, the AC-plugin can define new categories, and the administrator can also define new categories as needed.

Categories can be used for grouping similar events together, like “Access Point error”, and “Access Point powered off” to a category like “Access Point down”, or simply “Error”. And the administrator can then just create one alarm for all events belonging to this category.

Categories can also be used to combine events that should be handled in a similar way, for example have the same action executed.