How does AutoList decide what order to list piping in? Here are the general listing rules that pertain to the order: Welded piping (whether lines or mains) lists before Threaded piping Welded piping is listed in alphanumeric order (specifically, the ASCII order) Per the ASCII order, numbers list before letters. Punctuation marks, including spaces “…

We've all seen this. You have a nice drawing in front of you, but when you do Zoom Extents (or Zoom All), your drawing disappears and you find yourself floating out somewhere near the (ex)planet Pluto. You select all around outside of what you want to see and there is nothing there. Sometimes you can…

HydraCAD has long been able to create a file that can be opened in the JCI/Tyco/SprinkCAD Fluid Delivery Time program. That program is required to open the exported file. Hydratec and SprinkCAD worked together to offer this tool. The file can be created from HydraCAD using a process similar to AutoCalc. The following is from…

Way back in the olden days of 2014 I wrote a blog entry on BIM LOD. Sometime between then and now they snuck in a BIM Level 350, so I figured it was time to revisit this topic. From www.united-bim.com  In the current context, there are six different levels of development that are defined by…

When a riser nipple is inserted a property is programmatically set identifying the riser nipple as a Line, Main, Arm-over or Underground for listing purposes. This can be ascertained by looking at the Properties of the rider nipple in question. Most of the time, the way it is set is perfectly correct. On occasion, however,…

I never knew about this option until Googling about it today related to a customer reported problem. The problem was related to an old AutoCAD bug which allows a build up of a great number of annotation scales. This will cause a fatal error at various times in a drawing session. But, it won't cause…

Many users prefer to use their own colors, linetypes, lineweights etc. when drafting. HydraCAD is set up to do just that. The only thing you cannot do is to change our layer names. But, you can add your own layers if you want. The best overall approach is to set up your own template, beginning…

Today's customer question: "How do you draw an Up/Down sprinkler (Upright on a Tee, with a Pendent Drop) in HydraCAD?" This is actually easier than it seems. You just have to define the two heads, as usual, and insert them at the same X,Y location (i.e. on top of each other).  Back in the 'old…

From a customer: "I am trying to create a Trimble point layout for my beam clamps only.  Is there anyway to isolate the #01 Hangers from the #05 Hangers?" While there isn't a direct way, there is an indirect one. There is a way to grab a selection set based on an attribute value. This…