Off-line method of depicting piping items of pipe specification files of a computer-aided graphics system, without duplications occurring

Claim 1

An off-line method of eliminating duplicate piping items associated with a pipe specification file of a computer-aided graphics system for generating a material ordering description report, said file containing unsorted piping items from a plurality of different piping classes but all of said piping items being associated with the same individual pipeline project, said system having two-dimensional pipeline coordinate axes, a planar axonometric representation of a three-dimensional pipeline in which material and non-material piping elements of said pipeline are associated with a multibit digital code representative of a series of workpoints compatible for use within a digital computer system, and workpoints including dominant and subservient points having known coordinates with respect to intersecting axes X, Y and Z, and being identified in relative three-dimensional coordinates by a distance (d) between points and values of angles of a straight line intersecting them as related to orthogonal planes of reference, comprising: (A) inputting, off-line, said pipe specification file associated with said pipeline project both (i) as machine readable dara words or portions of words, and (ii) as a function of a piping classification index containing different classes of said piping items in a preselected data format, for operation within said system; (B) scanning said inputted pipe specification file, class record-by-class record, to identify and then eliminate duplications, of said items of said file associated with said project irrespective of class origin; and (C) displaying said piping items of (B) in association with a stored code of catalog order descriptions of said items, to generate said material ordering description report whereby a general overview of the project is efficiently provided.