Nipple, socks etc

Does anyone have a good way to add a nipple and/or a sock to the outside of pipe for branching or instrumentation purposes ?

Doing this in piping in Solidworks proves to be more of an headache then I thought possible.

This is what it should do when you want to add one :

- recognizes the pipesize it gets put on to so as to automatically jump to the outside of the pipe

- being able to select if one want it on 0°-90°-180°or 270° position

Now if you try this with the weldolet that comes standard with SW

(see documents and settings\All Users\Application Data\SolidWorks\SolidWorks 2010\design library\routing\piping)

then it does this however .... you then run into the fact that you can't change the position of it anymore. Or in other words, the distance from the nipple to another routing element can't be changed. This is a real bummer.

I asked SW about it but there 'solution' is to not use it as a "piping" element and manually select the size as well as manually putting in mates to get it positioned. (????)

Yes, that works but that doesn't make much sense.

Anyone have any beter suggestions ?