| T O P I C R E V I E W |
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Posted - April 28 2005 : 11:44:49 PM
My company has just purchased an "Electrical Addon" for AutoCAD. Yes it saves me heaps of time creating BOM, cross referencing, etc.
Unfortunately, one of our clients insists on a particular title block and title attribute block (ie they keep the page "title/frame" and attributes in seperate blocks). They use this standard to automaticlly extract the title block information to update their drawing database
And yes, you guessed it, the "Electrical Addon" software requires me to combine the two blocks, and change the attributes names, to give the title block it's smarts.
This probably isn't a problem for most clients, as all they check is that the print out looks ok. One thing going for me is the fact they don't check the electronic drawings untill the end of the project.
The solution I was thinking of is to use the new software, with the changed title block, do all my design, review, build and as-build cycle. When I have to finally issue the electronic copies, use Hurricane to run a script of the drawing set.
The script would:
Insert the correct "title frame" block and attribute block.
Map the attribute values from the "combined title" block into the attribute block.
Then delete the "combined title" block.
Purge/zoom e/etc
Is there currently a way of doing this with Hurricane/AutoCAD? It's a bit like using $TAG1$, but $TAG1$ actually point to an attribute, in a block, in the drawing.
Is any of this doesn't makes sense, please let me know.
many thanks
Gavin |
| 4 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Miksteele |
Posted - May 02 2005 : 7:22:59 PM
I've had similar needs. A while back I read something about the command -EATTEXT on 2005. I'm still running AutoCAD 2000i here... so not having tried this personally I don't know what type of output file this actually creates. However, it would seem that if you can already export attribute data to a file... ??? |
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Posted - May 02 2005 : 6:51:10 PM
Thanks for your reply. It has at the very least helped me identfy what is needed. My company has a couple of inhouse software engineers, who enjoy a challenge and should able to develop a working lisp routine. |
| Admin |
Posted - April 29 2005 : 12:31:57 PM
Hmm... this is something I've pondered quite a bit.
I **think** the only way this could be done is with a lisp routing that plucks the values, and then places them accordingly into the "other" block.
I've got a few more things that would be nice, but unfortunately, I haven't found anything that does similar... They all kinda tie into the same sort of needs...
1) It would be nice to transplant one attributes data into another.
2) It would be nice to be able to select a piece of text, and populate it with the attribute data from a block.
3) It would be nice to be able to save values BETWEEN drawings, so data can be passed between them (I've only seen this done with VIA/WD (which is now called "AutoCAD Electrical"  ), which uses a database to do this)). It would be kind of cumbersome, but if a lisp could be written to PUT a piece of data into to a text file, then another lisp to GET that info and use it... This could be possible with lisp... I wish I had more time!
I think this is one of those jobs that is best left for someone that actually knows what they are doing with lisp... (I consider myself just a lisp beginner)
If there is anyone out there that can contribute/collaborate on this , we could come up with quite a nice system. I think what is required is to just create a small lisp library that does all these small fundamental things, then just call them in the scripts wherever required...
Regards,
Bill
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Posted - April 29 2005 : 12:16:37 AM
PS I have just upgraded to AutoCAD 2005, and it has attribute extraction utility. Maybe, I could use that to extract the attribute values. |
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