Automatic Connection Symbols

[casquatch]

As far as I know there isn't a workaround or any possible way to get this accomplished. And maybe I'm crazy for wanting it, feel free to chime in.

I think it would be nice to have the ability to nest an annotation family within another family and have that nested annotation show through to the model. For example: I create an Air Handling Unit, it has an electrical connection. I would like to nest a special connection symbol in the unit that is able to turn on via Visiblity Graphics. Say the nested family is defined as an Electrical Fixture, if Electrical Fixtures are turned on in the View, the symbol shows up.

Does this make sense? This would eliminate duplicate data entry, as the user would only have to enter the information for the one unit and not the special connection family parameters too.

Maybe I'm missing something, if so point it out.

[CoreyDaun]

I'll explain our method of dealing with this in the hopes that is helps...

A lot of our Mechanical Equipment families have Electrical Connectors, but not all of them. On our electrical plans, we only show the equipment that is relevant to our electrical design. We have created a Subcategory, named "Non-Electrical", in all of our Mechanical Equipment families which are intended to be excluded on the electrical drawings. All of the model elements (i.e. extrusions) are placed on this subcategory. When it's turned off (via V/G) on an electrical View, all of the 'unpowered' Mechanical equipment is turned off.

As an alternate means to accomplish the goal as described above, one could add a Shared Parameter, named "Non_Electrical", as a Yes/No Type Parameter in all Mechanical Equipment families. This parameter can then be used in conjunction with a View Filter that would turn off the same equipment. The benefit to this method is that this parameter can be used in the Filters of a Schedule.

For a few Mechanical Equipment families, we show an annotation symbol to represent the equipment in lieu of showing the actual geometric model. In these families, we set the geometric model elements to be hidden on Medium Detail level and then add the desired Generic Annotation. In the electrical Views, the Mechanical Equipment Category is specifically set to Detail Level: Medium, through V/G overrides.

The Mechanical Equipment Category is never turned off on our electrical power plans.

[casquatch]

Interesting. We typically show the mech equipment, just very light, and then show a spec cx or motor symbol for it on the Elec plans.

We are currently placing the mech equipment and then also placing a face based Electrical element on the mech equipment.

It would be nice to just place the Mech equipment and adjust all the parameters within that family. There is always the option of placing an elec element with just annotation in the family, and then connecting directly to the Mech connector.

It is always helpful to see how others are doing things though.