Ask to replace tag

[johan.degreef]

Sometimes when I assign a TAG, it asks me to choose another one or give the TAG to this piece of equipement. That is good, but rare.

But otherwise it just displaying an error saying the tag is already used, which is bad way of doing it, but comes most often.

How can I set it, that it asks me to assign the given tag to this selected valve/instrument, and put a questionmark on the one that was previously with that tag?

hopefully I am clear.

Thx, Johan

[Michiel.Valcke]

Hi Johan,

Unfortunately that doesn't work that way. In the case of an Equipment like a tank or vessel you can have duplicate tags, because you can have the same tank on multiple P&ID drawings, an equipment can have too many lines connected to be representable in a single drawing. In the database they will be one and the same, and edits made to one will affect the other.

For items such as valves it is not allowed to be duplicated across drawings, and the system has always worked such that the one already existing will remain unchanged. In such a case I usually place the component with a placeholder tag and change them from the datamanager. 

If you would like the option to 'untag' the already existing item, that would be additional functionality. You can try to post an idea about it in the idea station and post the link here so others can vote for it.

[johan.degreef]

I think if nobody asks for in until now (+20yrs), it will never happen....

[Michiel.Valcke · Accepted solution]

it could be that it's an easy thing to implement and so far nobody has asked for it because people didn't think about it or they just didn't bother voicing their idea.

I think it would make the software more user friendly and make it feel more powerful if you had an interface or dialog box at that point that allowed you to edit both tags. It would allow you to change the existing component's tag and continuing with yours, but it would also help with catching erronuous tags in existing components and general understanding of a project if you can actually see which component has the conflicting tag. I can see a lot of *Oooh, Right ...* kind of moments to be had.

There's also the case where a tag can exist in the PnPTagRegistries table of the processpower database after Plant 3D experienced a crash, but there is no actual component with that tag in the database. It will cause the above error, but if you don't know what's happening it can be hell to figure out how to fix it. 
The dialog box would be able to check and see that the tag only exists in the tag registry but has no component linked to it and would give the user the option to either remove it from the registry, or reassign it to the current component or pick an untagged component of the same class to link it to.

There I talked myself into making this idea 🙂 - vote for it here:
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-plant-3d-p-id-ideas/tag-update-dialog-box-with-conflicting-ta...