Managing engineering design content is crucial in industrial process facilities. As these facilities often involve complex systems with many drawings, organizing, referencing, and controlling that documentation effectively can be challenging. This is where a SOCKETWorx (SWx) comes in as an essential web tool to organize, track, and process drawings. It is an essential tool to ensure that critical engineering documents are always up to date, properly referenced, and easily accessible.
This solution article presents a strategy for automating Drawing Index system. This approach uses SQL queries to extract and populate relevant engineering data from design content, such as engineering worksheets, diagrams, 3D models, and drawing output from them, to create an efficient and consistent 'SWx Drawing Index'.
Why Do Project Teams Need a SWx Drawing Index?
Before diving into the technical details, let’s take a moment to understand the benefits of this Drawing Index. We equate it to establishing a standard operating procedure that is expandable to encompass numerous data sources and is sustainable.
1. Establish Deliverable Requirements: Create a list of drawings from Day 1, or as soon as requirements develop from Engineering workbooks, DIAGRAMS, and 3D Models. These methods efficiently accumulate deliverables from all these sources, to form dedicated drawing collection system. Undoubtedly, drawings added on Day 1 will yield requirements for more drawings based on asset references within them grows over time.
2. Globally Control Revisions & Releases: Managing drawing revisions becomes easier when every revision detail, author, discipline, type, and title is centralized in an index. This keeps teams aligned, especially when working across different disciplines or departments. The SWX Drawing Index can feed SWx Work Orders to assign creation or modifications to team members.
3. Automate Meta Data Population: By leveraging SQL queries to automatically extract, synchronize, and populate drawing data from other SWx Data Worksheets. This ensures SWx Drawing Indexes remain accurate with values from these sources. This is very important because these sources often collect and store Parental data for SWx Drawings Indexes.
4. Track Drawing Livelihood: Drawing files are often born by AutoCAD, one of its toolsets, or plugin applications like DIAGRAMS, ISOWorx, or VIEWWorx. When these applications add drawings to their databases, it is beneficial to track them by querying dataset sources. The SWx Drawing Index can be set up to inspect for orphaned drawings and when they were deleted from sources.
5. Standard Operating Procedures in Minutes: This article offers procedures that target native data sources This article focuses on the methods for DIAGRAMS project tables. The basic logic can be replicated for mechanical and electrical engineering tables or other CAD application tables.
The Process: Building Your SWx Drawing Index
To manage the datasets from engineering worksheets, diagrams, and CAD content, we'll employ SQL queries to automate the extraction, population, and maintenance of the SWx Drawing Index. Below, we will walk through the approach using specific SQL snippets, explaining the key steps of the process.
DIAGRAMS Project Drawing Data Extraction
In this use case, we target the drawing borders inserted into drawings. There are two permissible borders, and they are used as criteria to find them and their data. Selecting relevant data from the `Items` and `Drawings` tables and transferring it to drawing indexes. In this case, we are using a temporary table, #borders, to store the extracted data from DIAGRAMS projects:
SELECT-FROM-WHERE to Extract drawings by borders
INSERT INTO the SWx Drawing Index DIAGRAMS Project #borders
For drawings that do not yet exist in the `SWx_DrawingIndex`, we insert them as new rows and populate index columns taking full advantage to transform data specifically for them and think about adding CASE statements to aid in quality assurance, querying, and reporting. The following example ensures that new records are added to the index for drawings not already listed and uses a CASE statement to perform a quality assurance step to identify Invalid Types. User SYS_DrawingSource, to identify origins because you'll repeat this procedure for other sources like AutoCAD PLANT 3D and its drawing data cases.
UPDATE the SWx Drawing Index
Once the data is extracted into the `#borders` and new drawings have been inserted, let's use the temporary table o update the SWx_DrawingIndex with the current information. The following SQL snippet updates the `SWx_DrawingIndex` table, setting the targeted columns. Maintaining the same accumulation and transformation criteria as the INSERT INTO method ensures identical results between the two operations from birth.
UPDATE SWx Drawing Index to flag Orphaned Drawings
It happens, generally always. CAD files are often deleted, renamed, or otherwise abandoned. This method identifies those drawings and lifts them to the surface. Those drawing gone missing since the last 'system check' have become orphans within the drawing index so it updates `SWx_DrawingIndex` columns to flag them as "CAD Orphan", and report the date deleted:
SWx Drawing Index - a Standard Operating Procedure
By following this strategy, industrial process facilities and their engineering and design project teams can efficiently manage drawings indexes that accumulate across datasets. Whether added manually or via SQL queries, it centralizes requirements and deliverables.
It simplifies the task of maintaining up-to-date references for engineering drawings, automatically updates key fields like revision levels, and helps prevent confusion over which drawings are active or orphaned. Additionally, it can streamline tasks such as bulk drawing border updates and file renaming, ensuring that published content is accurate and consistent improving content quality.
By integrating these methods into your standard engineering or operational practices, you ensure that your operations and associated capital projects run more smoothly, with accurate and accessible documentation ready for change events.