Changes to the Pipe Fabrication Pipe Sketch Application - *12​.1 SP5*

This enhancement is a considerable change to the Pipe Sketch form and the preview mechanism involved. The new modified form includes new columns for Drawing Name, Revision Number, and drawing Status.

Like the old version, there is a mechanism to preview a plot file to show the current drawing. Additionally, a new option has been added to show the previous version if one exists. Rather than having the preview options as a right-click menu, these have been positioned in check boxes at the bottom of the form.

This development exists in both Marine and Plant and essentially works in the same way, except for the fact that the preview plot files have a different format. Marine outputs TIFF files and Plant outputs PDF. Whichever format is in place; the appropriate viewer is called from Windows using the Windows file associations. For PDF, it is usually ADOBE ACROBAT and for TIFF it may be Windows Photo Viewer or Paint depending on the association.

An option for printing the selected list of sketches is also available from a right-click menu using the default printer. Previously batch printing was available by using the plot viewer but this has now been deprecated

For comparing latest and previous versions two separate windows are employed as shown below:

For Marine:

For Plant (showing an alternative template)

This comparison mechanism allows the user to compare the current plot file with the previous one but does not address the possible rejection of the current version. This is counter to the principle of having the drawing reflect the current version of the model.

To represent the revision number on the drawing,  the following intelligent text may be added to a TEXP on the pipe sketch backing sheet.

The btext for just the revision number is  ‘#RVSN<FR SREVAY[1]>’ .

Pipe Spool Drawing Form Changes

The three new columns on the form are as described below:

Drawing Name

The drawing Name is the actual drawing name within Marine Drafting or Draft. The drawing name is defined by a naming rule in the Naming Rule File on the drawing options tab. This is unchanged.

If a corresponding drawing cannot be found, the column contains the text No Drawing.

Revision

Pipe sketches Sheets now have a REVI element Added to provide revision details. Some templates have these already but some don’t so the pipe sketch application utilises existing revi’s or adds new ones as required. Revisions are numeric and each new drawing increments the revision by 1.

Every time a pipe sketch is re-created, the existing drawing is moved to a revision registry of the same name as the current registry with the text ‘_Revisions’ added. The application then finds the latest numeric revision number and increments the new drawing revision accordingly.

Old revisions are not deleted but may be deleted by the user if required.

Drawing Status

The drawing status column actually reports the status of the preview files by comparing the plot file date with the actual drawing in the system. If a drawing has been updated in the drawing module, say for manual additions. The comparison would reveal that the drawing is now newer than its corresponding plot file. In this instance the drawing status would say that the preview file is out of date. The previews can be updated using a right click-menu option.

If the drawing and preview are compatible, the status column displays the date and time the drawing was last updated.

Fab Check Status

The Fab Check Status column remains broadly unchanged and can contain ‘Valid’ or ‘Needs to be released’.

Deleted Drawings

Deleted drawing are difficult to find because the spool to which they relate no longer exists. The process of picking a spool and finding corresponding drawings has to be reversed by finding drawings which no longer refer to a valid spool. This is done by finding all pspool drawing types with an invalid design element as its drawing target.

Each time the Pipe Sketch form is displayed, a check is done for deleted drawings and a list added at the bottom of the form. Deleted drawing elements are not deleted automatically to allow them to be checked, but can be deleted using a right mouse click option.

Practical Example

The following is a practical example of key features. In this example we will take an existing spool and show what happens when we add two sets of flanges to split the spool into three.

This is the starting point.

After adding the flanges and validating the spools, and refreshing the spool drawing form, the new layout reflects the changes.

Spool number 1 still exists but now shows that it requires update, Spools 2 and three have yet to be drawn so the drawing status is none and the revision is 0

Next, the three spools are selected in the form and the ‘create drawing’ button pressed.

The results are shown below.

Now we can compare the changes in spool 1 where rev 3 was the whole pipe and rev 4 is just a straight spool.

The new Drawing (Revision 4) is on the left and the old drawing (Revision 3) is on the right

Now we will make changes by modifying the pipe to delete one spool by removing a set of flanges. After validation and adding the pipe back into the pipe sketch form the new display is as follows:

The spool which has been deleted no longer exists, but the drawing still exists in the drafting database. During initialisation a scan is done to identify deleted drawings and the user has the option to investigate each individual drawing or select the list and delete them all using a right menu click as shown below.

This runs a process to delete the drawings and when complete displays the message as below:

Next, the one modified spool is updated with revision 2 as shown below:

Now if we compare the pipe sketches we can see the changes.

The new Drawing (Revision 2) is on the left and the old drawing (Revision 1) is on the right

Recognising Revised Drawings.

In cases where the pipe sketch is modified manually the actual drawing is no longer reflected in the preview file. In this case when the pipe is added to the pipe sketch form, a check is made to ensure that the current preview file matches the drawing. This is done by comparing the respective dates of the drawing and the plot file. If the drawing is newer than the plot file then the preview plot is out of date. See below:

To update the preview there is a right click menu as shown below:

After completing the update, the current date and time are shown. This relates to the time the preview was changed. You can check the modifications by comparing the two plot files.

The changes in this case are to reposition the dimensions to avoid dimension lines crossing. The revision number is not updated unless it is done by the user editing the drawing.

Data Structure

Drawing and Registry Names

The data structure in the drawing database is constructed based on the ‘Drawing Options’ tab on the spool drawing form. The department and registry names are defined by one of three methods. Uniquely in marine there is a tick box for using the Marine environment. This sets the department and registry names according to a list of pre-determined marine drawing types loaded into the form.

An alternative is to select the Using Desi Heirachy box, which bases the drawing and registy names on the current pipe’s zone and site names.

The third alternative is to enter a name in the fields directly.

Note:
The Marine environment setting is not available in Plant and the option is not visible.

Orphaned Drawings

If you delete a pipe or some pipe spools in the design, some Pipe sketches in the drawing database may become invalid because they no longer reference a real design element. These sketches are described as "orphaned" because they no longer have a parent PSPOOL in the design. The "Show All Orphaned Drawings" toggle allows you to see and via a right mouse click, delete orphaned drawings.

If the "Show Orphaned Drawings" toggle is unselected (Recommended) orphans are only shown if any of the current pipes have orphans.

If you delete spools and pipes frequently, the list of orphans can be quite large and the list is populated each time you add design items to the pipe sketch form. To avoid long delays, it is recommended that you delete orphans regularly. To do this you can select the list of drawings you want to delete and select the delete Orphaned Drawings menu from the right click on the form.as shown below.

Note:
The "Delete Selected Orphaned Drawings" menu is only available if there are orphans to delete.

Drawing DB

The drawing database for the marine environment above is as follows:

Additionally there is a revisions registry which stores all revisions. This is created automatically when the first sketch is revised. On the drawing options form there is now a value which sets the maximum number of revisions stored. The minimum is 1 so that you always have the previous version to look at.

This shows a list where the maximum revisions is set to 20 so it will store the previous 20 versions. For a large number of drawings this could mean a lot of revisions which may exceed the database limit of 1000 per DB

Plot Files and Isometric Files

All files should be saved according to the result file Path on the Drawing options tab.

The structure is shown below:

First of all there is a directory with the base registry name.

This then contains two directories and a series of plot files:

The cache directory is used to store previous copies of preview files. So each time a new drawing is regenerated, its previous plotfile is copied into the cache directory before a new on is produced.

If the drawing templates are using Isodraft plotfiles the iso directory stores the underlays.

Drawing Name Rule Changes.

The existing mechanism for spool drawing has been found to cause anomalies in the correlation between PSPOOL names and their corresponding pipe Sketches. This release has changed the default pipe sketch naming rule to include the spool name rather than the pipe name. The change is:

from

<PROJ CODE>-<NAMN OF ZONE>-<NAMN OF PIPE>-<INDEX>

to

<PROJ CODE>-<NAMN OF ZONE>-<NAMN OF PSPOOL>

This is necessary to avoid confusion between the spool name and the spool sequence.

For example, on a two spool pipe a user might add a set of flanges in the middle of existing spool 1.

PSPOOL 1 /2MZ-HP0901/PS/001

PSPOOL 3 /2MZ-HP0901/PS/002

Using the default auto naming the new spool would be named as spool number 3 but its sequence in the list of pspools would be 2. So the members list would now be as follows

1 PSPOOL 1 /2MZ-HP0901/PS/001

2 PSPOOL 2 /2MZ-HP0901/PS/003

3 PSPOOL 3 /2MZ-HP0901/PS/002

Using the old drawing naming rule, the drawing names would be evaluated as:

DRWG 1 /MAR-Psketch_Zone-/2MZ-HP0901/001

DRWG 2 /MAR-Psketch_Zone-/2MZ-HP0901/002

DRWG 3 /MAR-Psketch_Zone-/2MZ-HP0901/003

This list should be:

DRWG 1 /MAR-Psketch_Zone-/2MZ-HP0901/001

DRWG 2 /MAR-Psketch_Zone-/2MZ-HP0901/003

DRWG 3 /MAR-Psketch_Zone-/2MZ-HP0901/002

This uses the sequence of the PSPOOL in the PSLIST instead of the actual spool name so drawing names become inconsistent with the spool names.

Upgrading from SP4 drawings

In essence the processes remain the same. In plant the file format has changed from PDMS ‘.plt’ format to Adobe PDF and the storage directories have now been consolidated.

To upgrade an existing project, the plot file directory needs to be specified and the plot files regenerated.

To enable existing drawings to be maintained, a drawing renaming process needs to take place as described above. After this the plot files may be regenerated in the new file locations.