AutoCAD P&ID

[#1]

We are having problems copying drawing. What is the correct workflow for copying drawings within a P&ID project? We have dozens of drawings that are copies of original "seed" drawings and must have a way to create these without having to draw them from scratch.

I've tried doing a 'save as,' and then 'copy drawing to project' but the project manager doesn't seem to recognize the new drawing, but instead thinks it's the original drawing file. Also, it doesn't seem to want to sync with the database and throws a system exception.

I've even tried other methods such as copying the drawing in windows explorer, renaming the copied drawing, then trying to copy the drawing to the project. When this is done, the project manager seems to think that the copied drawing is still the same file as the original, and will not sync with the database to even give me copied tags (ex:V100?), but ususally throws a system exception.

Please help us with this...

Thanks in advance,

Craig

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Have you tried treating your 'seed' drawing as an assembly?

WBLOCK out the entrire 'seed' drawing to a non-project drawing.

Create a new drawing in your target project then insert and explode the non-project drawing.

Works for me.

Regards,

Andy

[#3]

So far that seems to be the best way to do a whole drawing.

The only problems I see using this method were also common to all of the other methods I tried.

1. The description fields in my off-page connectors were cleared out (probably due to the program placing new ones in their place).

2. The control valves/actuators seem to lose their block reference and have to all be replaced (which appears to be linked to a problem that I've been having where my valve substitution feature has stopped working, and only generic body (gate) valves come in instead of the valve I select. Autodesk confirmed this problem with the manual valve class where if you nest your classes too deep, it occurrs.)

Thanks for your help!

Craig

[#4]

That's an easy one. Just use Windows Explorer to copy in your folder and give the copy a different name. Then you can add the new drawing to the project with "Copy drawing to project...". That's it.

Using copy and paste to copy the object from a drawing into a new blank drawing has the disadvantage that the pipeline group properties (line number and service) won't be copied.

Carsten

[#5]

Carsten,

That was one of the first methods I tried, but I would always have trouble getting the program and database to recognize the content as new and unique. The program would see it as the seed drawing and it would be disregarded upon copying to the project.

The "wblock" method however, worked well. When I exploded the wblock in the new drawing, the program recognized it in the same way as if I had done a simple copy and paste - but with much more stability, and  it added all of the items as new content in the database as well. This method was much more consistent and stable.

Thanks,

Craig

[#6]

Hi Craig,

We have been using the wblock method also. When we explode it moves our instrument tags from their original positions. Have you had similar problems?

Ken

[#7]

Ken,

I can't say that I've seen any instrument tags get moved, but that doesn't matter much to us anyway due to having to completely replace control valve anyway.

Thanks,

Craig

[#8]

Craig,

I tried it with PID 2013 and it worked on my machine. After opening the copyied drawing you'll see the same Tags as in the original drawing, but they are independent of each other. So if you start editing the Tags in the copied drawing the Tags in the original drawing won't be changed.

Regards,

Carsten