Now, this can be done very easily when working with a custom MVPart and we’ll look at how to do that in this article. Another requirement by the owner was the individual numbering of every device or piece of equipment that could need maintenance. This meant that every valve, damper, filter, fire alarm device, panel board (and the list goes on) had to be individually numbered and tracked! Fortunately, this was done quite easily utilizing custom MVParts within our drawings. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll take you through how to modify an existing PSD file, but you can start from scratch to create your own. For the first step in the process we’ll need to open a drawing that contains the Bosch Speaker that we created in the MVPart example. This drawing will be how we set up our PSD, so save the drawing in a safe place. We’ll start by inserting one of our speakers by using the MVPart command. We have to force AutoCAD to generate the first PSD we want to modify. In order to do this, go to Annotate>Tags>Generic Equipment Tag. This tag will NOT contain the information we want, but that’s okay because we’re going to edit the PSD and make it what we want.
Our next step is to open the Style Manager from the Manage tab. Style Manager will default to managing the drawing that you’re currently in. Within that drawing there are different types of “objects” that can be managed. Right now we’re concerned with the Documentation Objects. Once we’ve expanded Documentation Objects, we’ll see another subset call Property Set Definitions. We can expand that selection and right away we should see quite a few PSDs for objects that already exist in MEP. The specific set we’re concerned with is the GTagEquipmentObjects. We’ll start by right-clicking on that specific PSD and selecting “copy.” Then we can right-click on the main “Property Set Definitions” and “paste.” Now we’ll have a new PSD called “GTagEquipmentObjects (2),” which we can rename to whatever we want. In this case I’m going to call it Bosch Fire Alarm Speaker. This default PSD has a lot of information contained within it, so we really don’t have to add much.
May 2013
PRODUCT FOCUS
AutoCAD MEP 2013
For our example we’ll be concerned with a few definitions: MarkAbbreviation, MarkAutoIncrementNumber, and we’ll add an additional MarkDeviceID. In this case I’ve changed the Default column in MarkAbbreviation definition from “AHU” to “SPR”. This will stand for “Speaker” in our case, but there is a multitude of options you can choose from. The last Definition that we’ll need to add is a “Name” formula. This will be used when we add equipment tags to the MVParts. We’ll click the “Add a Formula Property Definition” button and a new dialog box will pop up. I’m going to call this definition “Name” and add a formula as follows: RESULT=”[MarkAbbreviation][MarkAutoIncrementNumber].” What I’m specifying here is that the name of the object is a combination of the abbreviation “SPR” and the Auto Increment number. You can see the
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