Pipe support detailing is a cumbersome process that requires extrapolating dimensional information and then creating drawings with enough detail to fabricate the pipe supports.
Hypothesis: Using pipe support information from Plant 3D send the data to Inventor to automate the creation of the pipe support detail drawing.
Here’s an example of the support we’ll work with in Plant 3D.
Here’s the dimensional data that’s locked to the dwg (not in the database).
To exchange data, we developed a custom xml format that will contain information about our pipe support and how it’s managed in the Plant 3D database. This will act as a standard place we can use to interact with the project data from Inventor without having to actually post changes to a database. Instead we’ll be able to queue the changes up and notify designers when actions need to happen.
We added a couple options for getting pipe support data into your projects/reports. First is a command UPDATESUPPORTDIMENSIONS which will update database information for all the pipe supports in a drawing. Next we also added a reactor to object modify and object appended events, so that when you place a new support in Plant 3d, the Dimension property is automatically update.
