Polling Opions: NOD or Entity Property Values

[Anonymous]

I was wanting to poll for opinions.

I am going to soon begin a fairly large project where I will essentially develop my own drawing system represented API using the AutoCAD .Net API.  In times past, we've always developed our design automation around entity properties.  Sometimes these can be very creative.  For example, blocks with predefined attributes, making the layer name intelligent, using special dynamic block parameters to provide position, rotation, and even lookup information, etc. 

So my question is this...  What do you find most helpful for storing, retrieving, and managing representable information in drawings?

1.  X Data?

2.  Create entity properties as mentioned above?

3.  Combination depending on....?

So far, from what I can tell, the big differences are that X Data provides a nice clean way of storing the custom information but it's downside is that your code has to be loaded in order for this to be accessed which makes it difficult for third-parties to access and use your drawings.  But creative property usage can easily be used and maintained when third-parties have to access and use your drawings, however this can be a bit kludgy and requires extreme documentation of the property standards so that no one "does their own thing." 

This seems to be a bit of a catch-22, so I wanted to poll the braintrust here and see what you do and why you see it benefiical?

[augusto.goncalves]

It seems that being able to edit the data without your application loaded and running is key feature, if so properties can be better. Usually some developers prefer avoid that, meaning only edit the data with the application running, which can be safer and protects your IP.

Based on your requirements, personally I cannot see other ways....what else you can provide about your requirements?

Regards,

[Anonymous]

Well, it could really be anything, especially as it is expanded.  To give you an idea though, our work is electrical in nature (we don't use AutoCAD Electrical for a variety of reasons I won't go into here), so such properties could be for example insulation rating, wire guage size, circuit type (AC vs DC vs Current vs Potential vs Control....), panel location, device end wiring information, etc.  For wiring we have two types of drawings... a schematic and a wiring diagram. 

Currently our wiring diagrams do have some intelligence in the layer naming convention using curly brackets to designate fields where the format is {Panel ID}{Device ID}{Active/Historical}{Sequence Number for uniqueness}. 

On our schematics we use a lot of blocks with device information in attribute values, but with the new upcoming application I plan to develop, I want to embed more intellgence than this.  This basically means the door is wide open for me to redevelop and redesign our system and setup from the ground up.  That's why I thought I would poll and get a feel for what others think and do.  I'd rather do it right to begin with.

[augusto.goncalves]

So if you are storing sensitive data, I would not go with attributes as the user can manually (without your application) change it and this can cause the data to become corrupt/invalid.

You can store 'hidden' data with xData and xRecord, but usually the xData is easier regarding copy/paste behavior, although xRecord can store more data. Also xData is slower than xRecord.

Hope this help.

Regards,