Advanced Node Topics

Mainline Downstream, Users Upstream

The one-connection-per-relationship restriction can seem a bit of a problem in some cases - particularly when you have hundreds of items being fed from a single asset (water pump, power transformer etc.)

However, the 'Mainline Downstream - Users Upstream' approach can help you handle this.

In this case, you build your main line on the upstream asset. But you build each minor T-off from the downstream asset.

The description isn't overly clear, so let's go through a worked example.

The Main Water Pump (A) provides water to all of the other assets (B-F)

Drawing each and every connection from the main line to asset B & F sounds like an exhausting process that we don't want to tackle at this point.

However, what we can do is break the work up. In the diagram above, the blue line is created from asset A. Later on, we can create the red lines between B-F and the main-line.

For Asset A, we only draw the main line connection and we don't create the branches.

Then for each asset, we can create individual branches when we decide that level of detail is required.

Note that in this case, the pipework you create is added to the parent pipework rather than being attached to the downstream asset.. The pipe from B to A is added to the A pipe, leaving you free to add new connections from B to Q, if required.