Most people who have done any customization in Plant 3D are familiar with creating Class Properties in the project, but what if you want to pass preset information from the Spec into those Class Properties? Though it may feel like it’s a bit time consuming to populate in the Spec, it is not that difficult to do, and in reality, it does not take that long either. Plus, once it is set up, it can be passed from project to project when you use the "Copy Project" function. You can use that information in custom tags, annotations, BOM's, Iso's, Reports, or anywhere in the software that you use any out-of-box properties.

Intro

Have you ever tried to open a project in AutoCAD Plant 3D/P&ID and not been able to?  As projects are developed we may encounter errors or difficulty opening files.  Sometimes things work fine for some people working on the project, but not others.  When a project is networked, these inconsistencies in performance can occur more frequently.  So what’s the problem?

At the end of my last article, “AutoCAD^® Plant 3D and P&ID 2017.1 & 2018 - Spec Driven P&ID Project”, I mentioned that I would next tackle the addition of Pinch, Knife and Rotary Valves to both the P&ID Pipe Spec Object Mapping and the Plant 3D P&ID Object Mapping. In case you do not recall, the reason we need to cover this for the P&ID Spec Driven Project is because those valves are on the tool palette but as seen in this image they do not have a background hatch. If you look back at the previous article, in the Project Settings, I pointed out that the pinch valve was displayed in grey text because it had not been mapped. The same is true for the knife and rotary valves. Since they have not been mapped, the spec verification ignores these components and treats them no different than it would equipment, instrumentation or other components that are not in your specifications.