Project & Drawing Properties

Besides the Asset properties there are project and drawing properties as well. These properties can be used for Tags and Annotations as well. Very often there you used to fill out the title block of your drawing.

Below you see the default Project properties. As you can see the values of Project properties can be typed in within Project Setup only.

The Drawing properties created in Project Setup,

can be edited by making a right-click on the drawing in Project Manager.

Creating Selection Lists

There is no entry in the tree structure on the left side of Project Setup where you can find a list of all the Selection Lists. Therefore you need to find a property in a class that shows List as a Property Type. In the following picture you see for example that Pipe Line Group has been selected.

If you click on “Edit…” the Selection List Property dialogbox opens up and lets you make changes to all the Selection Lists.

Before closing the dialogbox make sure that you have selected the Selection List of the property when you clicked on “Edit…”. Otherwise the wrong Selection List will be assigned to your property.

Also check the Default Value of the property, because the first value of the Selection List will be used as the Default Value and you probably want to have a blank Default Value.

Step 3: Define acquisition rules

AutoCAD P&ID allows acquiring data from other classes. For example the Hand Valves acquire Size and Spec from the Pipe Line Segments.

You can acquire data from your drawing and project properties as well.

Having said this, there are limitations too. Below you see the list from the AutoCAD P&ID Help listing the existing relationships.

• LINE and INLINE ASSET

• LINE and START ASSET

• LINE and END ASSET

• LINE and ARROW

• ANNOTATED and ANNOTATION

• LINE and BREAK

• LINE and PAGE CONNECTOR

• LINE and NOZZLE

• PIPE LINE GROUP and PIPE LINE

• SIGNAL LINE GROUP and SIGNAL LINE

• PIPE LINE GROUP and SIGNAL LINE GROUP (if you manually associated the groups using SLGROUPEDIT).

This list may seem a little to theoretical, especially if you don’t know all the classes and expressions yet. Therefore it’s good practice – even for seasoned users – to sometime just check what works.

Equipment can acquire from:

Inline Assets and Instrumentations from:

Lines from almost everything except from other Lines:

Nozzles from:

Pipe Line Group from:

First thing you may notice is that Spec and Size are not listed (for whatever reason). If a Pipe Line Group acquires data from a Line the value will be acquired only if the multiple segments of the Pipe Line Group have the same value. Otherwise you’ll get a ? as a result.

As the list of relationships above suggests there would be some more screenshots. Just try yourself a little.

Step 4: Create template drawings (dwt)

Drawing template files for P&IDs or no different than regular DWT files. So if you already have existing DWTs you can use them.

Frame and Title block can be in Model or Paper space.

What you can add is the properties from your Project or Drawing. For that you simply use the AutoCAD® Command “FIELD”.

For the Project properties select CurrentProjectCustom. You then can select the Custom property category and Custom property name.

For the Drawing properties you select CurrentDwgCustom.