Hagerman & Company, Inc. Technology Bulletin

AutoCAD® MEP 2009: Creating and Linking to the Electrical Project Database

By David Cruze,
AEC Solutions Engineer
Hagerman & Company
Knoxville, TN
 

One of the most exciting enhancements of ACAD MEP 2009 for electrical engineers is the electrical project database (EPD) which is now an external file. This allows you to manage your circuits and loads as you create and modify your circuited systems throughout all of your project drawings (dwgs).

Panels, circuits, devices and wires that make up electrical systems reside in multiple dwgs which are now linked to the EPD. This keeps track and ensures the accuracy of devices and loads in all project dwgs, even if devices in multiple dwgs are assigned to the same circuit.

To Create an EPD:

Electrical menu > Electrical Settings > Electrical Preferences

On the Electrical Preferences dialog, click the Electrical Project Database tab (shown below)

Next, click on the NEW button, browse to a location for the EPD to reside and enter a filename, then click Save (shown below)

Once created, you can now link project dwgs to your EPD. To link a dwg, while open, go back to the Electrical Project Database tab of the Electrical Preferences and click the Open button. Navigate to the location of the newly created .epd file, select the file and click Open.

You must link all of your electrical project drawings to the same project database. You can link a dwg to only one EPD at a time. NOTE: When linking, you have the option to choose a Fixed or a Relative path reference. I recommend the Relative path as this reduces the risk of breaking the link between the dwg and EPD.

The drawing status bar shown above indicates no EPD has been linked to the current drawing. The status bar shown below, with the addition of the blue and red icon, represents a dwg with a linked EPD.

Reloading:

If two or more people are working on linked dwgs simultaneously, you can reload the latest data from the EPD into your active drawing to ensure that you have the current circuit information. Or if you have two or more linked drawings open, and you save changes to one, you can then reload the data into the other dwgs linked to the EPD. As soon as a linked dwg is saved, the EPD status icon indicates that the database needs to be reloaded as shown below (the icon has a warning symbol on it with a balloon notification). Simply click on the blue hyperlink and the database is reloaded. The status icon then returns to normal.

If other linked dwgs are not open upon saving changes to one dwg, you will see the below message, you do not need to reload. Simply opening the dwgs listed will automatically reload the EPD.

The database is also reloaded every 5 minutes to ensure accuracy. If you know a change has been made by another user, you can manually reload the EPD by right clicking on the status icon and choosing Reload Electrical Project Database (shown below).

If the EPD can not find one or more dwgs linked, the Reload Electrical Project Database dialog prompts you, giving you the option to remove the missing drawing data from the EPD. (shown below).

If you do not want to use the dwg in the EPD, click on the check box above to remove its data from the database.

If you want to keep the dwg data, uncheck the box above, relocate the file and reconfigure the related EPD to the dwg. This will sometimes happen if the dwg is on a server that is temporarily unavailable or if someone moved the dwg.

Unlinking: To unlink a dwg from the EPD

You can remove a linked dwg from the EPD, first, remove all circuited data from the dwg, then save the dwg. Upon saving, the data from that dwg is automatically removed from the EPD.

Then - Electrical menu > Electrical Settings > Electrical Preferences

On the Electrical Preferences dialog, click the Electrical Project Database > select <None> from the drop down list > Click OK > Save the dwg.

Using the external EPD allows engineers to create panel to panel connections across multiple drawings; this allows designers and engineers to utilize the schedules and reports in MEP to calculate live total build loads with 100 percent accuracy.