From the course: AutoCAD Plant 3D Essential Training: Admin

Add a new property to your class - AutoCAD Plant 3D Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Plant 3D Essential Training: Admin

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Add a new property to your class

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- Once you add a property to a class, you can use it to filter, to group, to sort, and report based on these values. For example, let's create a property for a project that will allow us to determine if a component is located on a module or in the field. Something very simple. So, let's open project manager and look at our class definitions. So, I want to come down to our Plant 3D Class Definitions. And I want to think about where we apply this class in the hierarchy. So, what kind of components do we want to have shown as a module or a field. Now, typically we'd want to have any piping components, any equipment, any structural steel, any fittings or any bolts and gaskets anything that we would need to calculate for bill of material to build this module. We need to assign it that ID. So, in this case, we don't want to assign it just to the equipment or just to the fasteners. We want to make sure we're at the highest level possible that covers everything. So, if we look at our piping and equipment, it means that we can assign a module ID to all of our equipment, fasteners, pipe run components, pipe bends, and structural steel. Everything has a value of module 123 that we can then filter. So, to add the class is straightforward. I'm going to go to piping and equipment. I'm going to come across to the right hand side of my properties and I'm going to say add. I'm going to add module ID. Now, I want you to just notice one thing. When you're assigning a property name, we can't have spaces. We have a display name which can have spaces but the property name itself must contain no spaces. And for this we're just going to use a numeric value whether it be 12345, and we're going to say okay. Now I want to scroll down a little bit here and see that we have our module ID ready to go. So, I'm going to apply that and choose okay. And let's go ahead and open our plant 3D drawing O-nine piping. So, I've already taken a look at this piping and marked out what I want to be as field piping and what I want to be as module piping. So, it's fairly simple, we apply this just using AutoCAD properties. So, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to choose all the properties to the right hand side of my module line breakpoint here. My module break. Now, I'm going to right click and I'm going to look at properties. If you get this no selection window, try again. And if you still don't get anything again, I'm going to look at the properties and you'll see here as we scroll down that we now have a field that allows us to assign a module ID. So, what I'm going to do is select all the components that I want to assign to module one. I'm just going to make sure I get my flanges here. And under the properties here, you'll see that we have module one. I'm going to apply down here module ID and I'm just going to add a value of one. So, now if we look at these individually, you can see that we have a module ID assigned. So, now let's go ahead and look at our data manager. So, I'm going to close this down. I'm going to open data manager. And I'm going to look at just the current drawing data. If I scroll across the top, you'll see we now have a field we can fill in for module ID. And you can see the components that we've chose have been assigned module one and the ones that we didn't are just blank. So, what I'm going to do is filter. I'm going to highlight something with a module one. I'm going to right click, and I'm going to say filter by selection. So, all we can see here now are items that contain module ID number one. And we can export that out to get a really quick bill of materials so we can understand what we're going to need to build this module. So, now I'm going to come to export, I'm going to use my display data, my active node only. And I'm going to just browse out and create this bill of material on my desktop. I'm going to call this module one bill of materials and I'm going to save that. And okay. So now let's take a look at that bill of material on our desktop and see what it looks like. So let's double click our module one bill of materials. And here's what we have. If we look at this, it's not very well formatted because it's basically just exported into our raw format. We can see the long description. So we've got all our bolts and gaskets, we have our valves, we have pipe, we have flanges, we have elbows, everything that's module one is listed here. And if we scroll across, we can see all the information that we have our class, we have sizes, line numbers, center of gravity, materials, so there's a lot of information that we have here. And we can see that everything is assigned to module ID one. So, if we wanted to get fancy with our spreadsheets, we can total the weight, we can look at the total poundage. How much is this going to cost once it's been built and assembled? We can group things out to order, we can look at our piping, we can look at our specs for our 300 pound piping. We can look at 300 pound valves, we can order our lines by size, by spec, by equipment type. So, basically, once you get the hang of these custom properties the possibilities are endless. You can group the data any way you want. And you can add any type of information that you can dream up. Just a few ideas are to apply some class that allow you to run isos based on a module ID. You can add construction work packages. You can add EWP numbers, you can run a bill of materials by area, by building. Just assign a value, apply the value to your model, and then anything's possible.

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