Use Acad.rx to load CADWorx Plant and Equipment at the same time

If you use CADWorx Plant Professional and find yourself going back and forth between CADWorx Plant (piping/structural) and CADWorx Equipment, you might like to have these both load through the same session. This can be done by combining the arx calls to both applications in the same Acad.rx (runtime) file. (Even if you do not use CADWorx this post should provide some good information about the Acad.rx file and how it works)

When AutoCAD is launched it searches for an Acad.rx (runtime file) in the support folders defined by the user profile. Any .arx files listed within the Acad.rx file are then automatically loaded. This is the mechanism CADWorx uses to load into AutoCAD. Note, AutoCAD will only acknowledge the first Acad.rx file it finds and will not look for additional Acad.rx files.

When CADWorx Plant is launched the top support path in the user profile (out-of-the-box) is C:\CADWorx 2013\Plant\Support. There is an Acad.rx file in this folder that loads 2 .arx files

Both of these .arx files are located in this same folder, therefore AutoCAD is able to locate and load them (because this folder is a support path) and CADWorx Plant is now loaded.

 

 

Now that we have covered the high level, here are the steps to get CADWorx Plant and Equipment to load at the same time:

 

Using Notepad, add a single line of text to load the CADWorxEquipment2013.arx file

 

 

This will instruct AutoCAD to load the CADWorxEquipment2013.arx file. However, AutoCAD will not be able to locate the .arx file because it is not in one of the support paths defined by the CADWorx Plant user profile.

 

So the next (and last) step is to add the CADWorx Equipment support path to the CADWorx Plant user profile. Important: Make sure to add the ..\equipment\support path below the ..\plant\support path. Otherwise, AutoCAD will load the Acad.rx found in ..\equipment\support (remember, the first one it finds) and it will not load Plant.

 

After doing this, launching CADWorx Plant will load both Plant and Equipment.

 

A few things to consider depending on your environment are:

• If you are managing CADWorx in a network environment you will need to update each user's Acad.rx file or make sure all users are using the same network based profile that is setup to load both Plant and Equipment.
• If your license plan has separate licenses for Plant and Equipment, this method will use 1 of each license.
• If you are already using an Acad.rx to load other .arx files you will either need to consolidate all of the .arx calls into 1 file or load the other .arx files using a different method. Of course, if you have been using CADWorx this is either not an issue or has already been sorted out.