By Andy Davis
I thought I'd mention some significant improvements that have been made to the Project Management functionality in AutoCAD P&ID and Plant 3D 2012, today.
- First off, when you rename a drawing in Project Manager the drawing file itself gets the new name and not just the entry in the project tree. Additionally, you can re-use the same folder name in multiple branches of the tree, too.
- Should you opt to use a SQL Server database as the data repository for a project rather than the SQLite database that is provided as standard, the database link configuration now has a dedicated page in Project Setup and a new page in the Project Wizard.
- Related to this, Autodesk have provided a new project maintenance utility program called PnPProjectMaintenance that is installed into the program folder to enable you to convert a project from the default SQLite database to SQL Server. You can also copy or move a SQL Server database to a different database name or server using this same utlilty.
- Finally, a couple of new commands are provided to significantly enhance the data linking capabilities of P&ID and Plant 3D. It is now possible to dynamically create new component property values – enabling multiple tag values to be created, for example - by automatically combining the values of other properties. It is also possible to link these and any other properties to records in external databases.
Please watch this space for further updates…