When you publish a document from an engineering tool to SmartPlant Foundation, if a property you want to retrieve into Smart Construction fails to publish, you can configure a retrieve function to search the objects related to the published document to find the desired property value.
For example, piping spools published from engineering tools do not have the Material Category property directly exposed on the piping spools themselves, but their components do expose this property. In this case, a retrieve function can be configured to check the piping spool components to populate the Material Category property.
A custom retrieve function can be used to traverse 'n' number of relations to get the required property values.
By default, Smart Construction delivers one custom retrieve function. This function requires a class name and arguments as inputs with multiple arguments separated by commas. The delivered custom retrieve function specifies properties for published objects that have a particular class definition. You can also create your own custom retrieve function, which requires a coded solution. Smart Construction delivers a sample solution that contains a sample of how to write a custom retrieve function. For more information, see Retrieve mapping.
We recommend creating a custom retrieve function to customize retrieve, rather than
creating a custom property processor.