Lines between two separate plant areas in P&ID - How to automate?

[Anonymous]

See the image below (or attached) for the general gist. "Line" refers to a pipe line on a P&ID.

Hopefully a visual diagram is better than a wall of text.

I'm still fairly new at AutoCAD and this has me stumped. There doesn't seem to be a work around.

[TomislavGolubovic]

I'd make the Area number come from a drawing property, rather than a class.

[Anonymous]

How would I got about doing that? Is it something involving the project properties to change the acquire mode?

[cadwomen]

so if your "separate plant areas" different drawings , this is the reason for your trouble i think

cw

[TomislavGolubovic]

Is each drawing a different area, or are the lines in each P&ID a different area?

For example, PID-001.dwg is Area 01, and PID-002.dwg is Area 02?

OR

Does PID-001.dwg have Area 01, 02, 03 in it, depending on the line?

[Anonymous]

It's option 1. ie "PID-001.dwg is Area 01, and PID-002.dwg is Area 02"

The trick is that when the area number is changed on one side, its either ouputs (in the "Plant area" field)

- "?" If the "Plant Area" field in the line properties is set to "acquire mode"

OR

- Some constant number, if the same field is set to "override mode"

I'm trying to get it so that the computer arbitrarily, chooses an automatic plant area. (So that ? or the constant number DOESN'T appear)

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

After much digging and uncovering, I found that I was missing some information!

This thing that I'm dealing with isn't a default arrangement for tagging P&ID lines. It turns out that the property "PlantArea" isn't a default property for AutoCad Plant 3D, it's an acquired property from "General.Drawing Area". Which explains the unique problem.

We've decided to use a Excel database update to fix any problems with Area changes, since the whole reprogramming idea is a bit daunting.