How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fields and PSDs

Did you ever think how useful would be to associate object properties with Property Style Definitions in Autodesk^® Architectural Desktop^® 2005. Well what happens when we try to do that?

Open a new drawing from the template and make sure that you have saved your previous work. Draw an object, line, circle or anything that makes you happy and at the command prompt type AecPropertySetDefine.

Now go ahead and create a new Property Set Definition and name it MyPropertySet. Highlight the newly created set and proceed to editing.

We will assign a new Manual Property Definition and the reason to do that is to be able to associate a Field entity with it. This, in theory, should provide a direct line of communication between Scheduling and Object Properties.

Name this Manual Property Definition as ObjectColor and in the Default text box, by the way of the shortcut menu, select Insert Field as an option.

This will initiate the Field dialog and from the list of available Field names select Object.

Now, knowing that you have something to select within the currently active file, be brave and click on the object selection button…….

The next step is to go straight to your task manager and kill Architectural Desktop.

Ouch!!!

Well, “always look on the bright side of life” and be assured that this bug has been corrected in Architectural Desktop 2006. The fact that you will not only be able to connect entity properties to your Schedule but also have the ability to link a database field directly to the Property Set Definition is a great step toward making this feature of Architectural Desktop even more powerful.