Align the drawing head with DDM

In this blog post, we will describe how you can customize the drawing header in your 2D drawing template to make it work smoothly with DDM and display the desired information.

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CAD Parameter Mapping

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Via the CAD Parameter Mapping tool in DDM-admin you can control which attributes should be displayed by default on e.g. the part in the 3D scene. You can also control which direction the values should be written, from CAD to DDM or from DDM to CAD or in both directions. Keep in mind that the changes you have made in this tool do not take effect until you restart DDM. At the bottom of this post you will find lists of some of the standard attributes found in DDM.

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Customize the drawing header in IRONCAD against DDM

If you are new to both IRONCAD and DDM , we recommend that you watch these two videos first to understand how the drawing templates in IRONCAD work:

Drawing Form Part 1/2 and Drawing Form Part 2/2

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Customize the drawing header in IRONCAD

When the part/assembly is loaded into DDM , DDM places attributes in different "sources".

First, they can be found under the file properties of the 3D model...

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...or part/assembly in the history tree under part and/or assembly properties...

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and from the file properties of the drawing:

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Linking of attributes

How do we now link our attributes to the 2D drawing? Open up the drawing template you want to change. We do this by going to Menu>File>Open

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Then navigate to the path of your templates(https://www.solidmakarna.se/hjalpcenter/where-do-I-find-my-2d-drawing-templates) select the template you want to open and then press ok.

For example, on this drawing template we want to retrieve an attribute from the 3D model (Part number). We first select the text tool under the Home tab and then drag out our text box by holding down the left mouse button:

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To find out the attribute we want to use, we switch over to the 3D scene and right-click on our part and select Part Properties(as mentioned, it can also be a assembly and then it will be Assembly Properties). Under Name, we find, for example, the attribute PART_NO and this is what we want in our drawing template.

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We now switch back to the 2D drawing and now you can either double-click on the text box to get into the properties or right-click on the text box and select Properties. In the text field, we now want our attribute, but in order for IRONCAD to understand from which source the attribute should come from, we need to add a line of code before our attribute. Since this comes from the 3D model's properties, we add the line $PRPPart and we also need to add"IC-".

Our code to be entered in the drawing header will then be: $PRPPart:"IC-PART_NO"

Then press OK

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The principle of adding other values is almost identical to the above except for the source of the attribute we want to read from. For example, if we now want to read from the file properties of the drawing instead, we can first create a text field in the same way as above, but we change the source of the attribute by changing our code slightly. In this case, we now want the date created by the drawing, so we can now go into the properties of the drawing and look for this value, which is DRAW_INITIAL_CREATE_DATE_DATE.

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Now to get the connection right we modify our code now by adding $PRPDrawing and IC-, our code will be: $PRPDrawing:"IC-DRAW_INITIAL_CREATE_DATE_DATE"

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The change list is also built in this way with attributes:

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When we are done with our changes to the template, press Save to save your changes to the template.

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Here you can download the drawing template that we use as an example in this post (saved in v2023 by IRONCAD):

Drawing template

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DDM-Drawing template attributes

The list below shows all standard attributes that can be added to a drawing template. The template can be configured to retrieve attributes from the 3D scene or the drawing. To insert any of these attribute values into the drawing header, you can copy from the lists below:

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Default attributes for the 3D scene

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Standard attributes of the 2D drawing

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Standard attributes for revision changes for the 3D scene

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Revision change attributes for the 2D drawing

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