By Andy Davis
I recently had a requirement show the Tag of an item of equipment on the OffPage Connector coming off of a process line that was connected to the equipment.
If we consider the behaviour of Acquisition properties there is quite a simple mechanism that we can use to do this.
We could use the From and To properties of the pipe line segments to which our OffPage Connectors are connected. However, if we did this, we would need to create separate OffPage and OnPage connectors since the To property of a line flowing off of a page will be empty and similarly, the From property of a line flowing onto a page will be empty.
New Acquisition Property
A neater solution is to add a new Acquisition property to Pipe Line Segments, let’s call it EquipTag.
We will define it as follows:
At first glance this may seem that it could cause a problem, since a line has two ends – but if we have an OffPage connector at one end, there is only one end that could be connected to an equipment item.
Modify OffPage Connector Block
In our OffPage Connector block, we simply add an attribute definition that contains the value #(PipeLines.EquipTag) to show the Tag of the connected item of equipment that is on the current drawing. To show the Tag of the item of equipment on the connected drawing, we add an attribute definition that contains the value #(=PipeLines.EquipTag).
For example, adding the above attribute definitions to the standard PIP OffPage Connector block gives the following results:
Drawing with OffPage Connector.
Drawing with corresponding OnPage Connector.