Just notes from Opie A commentary on AutoCAD and Civil 3d

Change Pipe Network Flow Direction

Can I get a show of hands for how many of you wish you could set the default Flow Direction Method when creating pipes? That’s a lot of raised hands. Of course, you can create a pipe rule in VBA or .NET to have this automated. But that turns into a lot of steps, just to change this one setting for each pipe. Thankfully, Autodesk has allowed access to this property through AutoLISP.

The property “FlowDirection” is a read-only property of the queried pipe. But there is another property of the pipe named “FlowDirectionMethod” which is writable.

The FlowDirectionMethod property requires an integer. The allowable integers range from 0 to 3 and represent “Bi-Directional” at 0, “Start to End”, “End to Start”, and finally “By Slope” at 3.

(defun OP:setFlowMethod	(oPipe iMethod / eSetPropertyAttempt)
  ;; Change flow direction method of supplied pipe object
  ;;_ Copyright © 2016 by Richard Lawrence
  (setq	eSetPropertyAttempt
	 (vl-catch-all-apply
	   'vlax-put-property
	   (list oPipe
		 'FlowDirectionMethod
		 iMethod
	   )
	 )
  )
  (if (vl-catch-all-error-p eSetPropertyAttempt)
    (vl-catch-all-error-message eSetPropertyAttempt)
    t
  )
)
Select all

This is intended as a sub-routine. One would need to supply the associated pipe object and the corresponding integer to this routine.

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