Add Redudancy to Instrument Tagformat

[jeroen.bolwerk]

Question

Is it possible to add Redundancy as a suffix to the Instrument tag structure in such a way that it can be filled in when redundancy is required, but left empty for normal instruments without redundancy?

Background

When we draw a P&ID we want to use the following Tag format for Instrumentation:

UNIT-TYPE-LOOP NUMBER-REDUNDANCY

Redundant Instrument tag in 2oo3 situation:  072-TT-013A, 072-TT-013B, 072-TT-013C

Normal Instrument tag: 072-TT-014

I have managed to add the redundancy to the tag format and it works well for Redundant instruments, but when I use it for normal instruments where the redundancy is left empty it doesn’t generate a unique Loop Number. It seems that all Subparts of the Tag format must be filled in in order to generate a Loop Number.

[jflorita]

I suggest you make the redundancy property a list type. Just add a blank in the choices and that should do it. There are other ways to do it probably but this one is easier.

[jeroen.bolwerk]

We have tried this but this didn't work.

When you make a List Propert and want to add an empty row, P3D  gives an error saying " Name Can not be Empty"  (see image: add empty row)

Even when this is possible you will still have the problem that P3D doesn't generate a Loopnumber when the redundancy is empty (see image: Generate Loopnumber)

[Michiel.Valcke]

As an alternative you could call your first loop xxx A so you can make a redundancy property and set it as default A (or you can try to set it as default %% - this is untested but normally that counts as data but shows up as empty in annotations/tags)

[jflorita]

@jeroen.bolwerk 
Yes you can add an empty row.

To do it, just right click the value bar and then select this.

[craig_wood · Accepted solution]

Hi @jeroen.bolwerk,

This is a common request, but unfortunately Autodesk didn't supply the necessary affordances for making this easy to accomplish. 

One way to accomplish this, although it's technically considered bad data practice, is to simply add your alpha suffix to the LoopNumber property where neeeded (e.g. 072-TT-013A, where "013A" is the value of LoopNumber). Of course this would require you to delete the out-of-the-box LoopNumber property, then re-create it as a string data type beforehand, which doesn't do you much good for an active project, unless you copy over the LoopNumber property values over into a new/blank property, recreate it, then copy the values back over to the newly-created LoopNumber property.. The only caveat or issue with this approach is if you want the base "072-TT-013" tag to show as an occupied tag so that other devices can't assume this tag; this won't accomplish that.

Another approach would be to create a calculated tag format using Auxalia's PlantExpressTools plugin; however, this is a much more sophisticated approach and would require going down a configuration route that you might not be comfortable.

I hope this helps at least provide some alternative methods for consideration.