Naming Tasks

When a Template/Area combination is selected during the drawing creation process, the default drawing name is the concatenation of the element names. For example, a drawing which used the template /DRTM-PIPING-A0 and area /A101 would be called /DRTM-PIPING-A0-A101.

An alternative naming method is provided by the inclusion of a user-defined naming task. This is a pml function which is run at the time the drawings are added to the drawing process form. It is slightly different to other tasks because the template and area names are inserted into the passed parameters as parameter 1 and 2, and the actual task parameters are appended.

Another difference is that the task function is expected to return a string to ABA. If the return string is empty, the default name is inserted instead.

Name Checking in Naming tasks

Naming tasks need to check if a drawing name is already in use. This is easily done by checking the database for a particular name, but it is possible that the name is also used in the list of drawings about to be created by ABA itself.

To check if a base product name has been used elsewhere, use the following method called from user-defined tasks:

!!abanewdrwgs.checkname(!namestring)

where !namestring is the required name.

This routine returns one of three values. 0, 1, and 2, where:

A sample of code to check this might be as follows:

!num = !!abanewdrwgs.checkname(!namestring)

This use of naming tasks is described in more detail in the Area Based ADP User Guide.