Welcome to part 2 of our deeper dive into automating property set data. This will pick up where part 1 left off so if you have not had the opportunity to work through that, I recommend doing so first.
Now that the property set definition has been created and assigned to structure objects, lets benefit from it! Labels are the most obvious way to utilize this data and I like to think of the property set definition we created similar to an expression on steroids because they are so flexible.
It is very common to have a set of label styles that are used while designing and a separate set of labels for the finished product. The design styles likely contain more information about the object being annotated to aid the design process and can also serve as QA/QC along the way. In my example, I have labels that initially show the structure name and the insertion elevation. Remember from the previous post, that the insertion elevation for manholes will be what we call out for the rim elevation while for inlets, we call out the form grade elevation.
It is very easy to utilize the property set data inside of a label style. Inside of the “Text Component Editor” from within “Label Style Composer”, there is a separate tab for property sets. From there, set the appropriate property set definition and pick the property to be added to the label style.
One important thing to note is that everything is treated like text (a string) so there are no controls for rounding or truncating numbers like what is found in other properties. That is why I needed to do the rounding in the property set formula.
The form grade property can be added to the label style like any other property. The finished design label looks like this:
As a designer, it is now easy for me to see what happening with the inlets and structures ensuring that the 0.5’ is being subtracted from only the inlets.
As the design progresses, at some point this pipe run will be incorporated into the sheet drawings. It really doesn’t matter if that happens by an external reference or a data reference, but the annotation would likely be simplified to show traditional output.
To quickly recap, this post described the process of utilizing property set information in label styles. A video demonstrating these steps can be found here. Stay tuned for the final installment of this series where this data is utilized inside of table styles.
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