AutoCAD® P&ID and AutoCAD® Plant 3D allow linking with external databases.
Most of you don’t know the command:
PLANTXDBMANAGER
This command is actually not even listed as a command in the AutoCAD® P&ID/Plant 3D Help. If you start this command you get the following dialog.
Even though there is not documentation for that you should at least know what this can be used for. The first thing you do is to add/define a data source. This can be any database for which an OLE DB driver is installed (e.g. SQL Server or MS Access). MS Access however can be tricky, because you probably have AutoCAD® P&ID/Plant 3D installed as a 64bit application. Your MS Office installation – and with it the OLE DB driver for MS Access – is probably running as a 32bit application. This won’t work. So you either have to install MS Office 64bit (not recommended by Microsoft) or use a different databasae.
After you established a valid data source you then define which table to look-up and which class to use. Then you define which Properties/Fields should be linked. This way the PLANTXDBMANAGER knows how to find the proper dataset in your external database. Last you define which Field from the database Table should be mapped to which Property in AutoCAD® P&ID/Plant 3D.
An alternative to the PLANTXDBMANAGER is PlantLink from the PlantTools series (see “Consider 3rd party solutions further down the document). PlantLink is much user friendly and more powerful.