Find that Grid : SPPID

Hi,

Few days ago, an issue was raised on linkedin that attracted my attention very well. A gentleman from a very reputed organization raised an issue that where can we find the location of grids of drawing in database to use it in automation. Although I should tell you that the discussion vanished the very next day, I don’t know how, but the questioned echoed in my mind for full two days, and I investigated well. In this post I’m trying to figure out what are the SPPID’s features that are available at system level.

If you’ve ever noticed, in your system registry, there is a HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Go to the Software section of that. There you’ll find all the installed software information. Select Intergraph. It obviously will contain all the (Intergraph) tools installed on the system. But let’s talk only about SPPID. It is advised that please do not change any value manually on registry, until and unless you know the result. In case of any malfunction, you’ll need to uninstall and install the tool again.

The facility of viewing drawing notes, labels, inconsistencies are available on your local machine. That is why when you switch them off for one drawing, it won’t be available for any drawing until you enable them again. Your EDE, Catalog Explorer and Properties Explorer are also managed locally. Even their locations are saved in the registry entry. Your SPPID grid color, depth, sheet color, all are stored in local machine.

The most interesting fact I found in the registry editor was that it contains the minimum value index of grid, but there was no trace of exact index value in the registry. I tried to find out the grid values stored in database, but did not succeeded yet. What I observed was that if I save the grid value of a particular drawing, it does not changes at all until the drawing becomes inconsistent with database and ask for recreation automatically. The grid value of one drawing does not apply to other drawings. With these observations I concluded that grid values of drawings are saved in database table with some code. The hunt is still on, I’ll update as soon as I get to it.

Have a great Life….