We're familiar with smart text such as $FILE$ and $DATE$ that is replaced during plotting or printing. The actual file name or date is substituted for the smart text by the plotting software.

Item Types offer the possibility to have a generally-available mechanism for the 21st century. For example, an Item Type library Environment might have an Item Type DateTime with properties CurrentDate and CurrentTime. By applying a suitable Expression, those properties would return the system time and date.

The Environment Item Type comes to life when attached to the active DGN file. One can then place text with a Text Field that references the DateTime.CurrentDate or DateTime.CurrentTime property.

This idea was spawned by this thread in Be Communities.

Who will benefit? Anyone who wants annotation that displays environment values such as date, time, computer name, computer user name etc.