Auto wire number tag removal on cabled wire networks - AutoCAD Electrical

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  Coinciding with the acquisition of VIA Development, Nate joined Autodesk in March of 2003 after a decade stint as an entrepreneur following a two-decade stint as a controls engineer and software applications developer at Owens-Corning. Nate is now the lead product architect for AutoCAD Electrical. He loves this stuff.

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  Auto wire number tag removal on cabled wire networks - AutoCAD Electrical
  June 14, 2007, 04:01 AM Nate Holt

  When AutoCAD Electrical sees a wire network, it wants to put a unique wire number tag on it. This is great in most instances. But if the network is basically a cable conductor/core tied between two connection points, then the wire number may be redundant. The cable tag-ID and core color code may be all that is needed. The wire number assignment just gets in the way.
  
  Example
  
  The three-phase motor control circuit shows a four conductor/core cable tied between the TB terminals and the PJ207 connector. Each core is marked with a unique color code assignment. But AutoCAD Electrical wants to pop in wire numbers as well.
  
  
  
  So, this question came up recently... How to suppress these wire numbers on networks that include a cable marker symbol?
  
  There are a couple manual options:
  
  Option A: Let the wire number go in but then flip it to "hidden" by using the "Hide Wire Number" command on the "Edit Wire Number" toolbar flyout. This moves the picked wire numbers to a layer that is marked as "Frozen" so it will not be visible (but will still be there on the wire and will satisfy AutoCAD Electricals burning desire to maintain wire numbers on all wire networks).
  
  Option B: Similar to above but use the "Hide Attribute" command (under the "Edit Attributes" toolbar flyout) and flip the wire number visible attribute to invisible.
  
  Option C: Use the "Erase Wire Number" command and manually remove them from the selected networks. As long as you don't re-run the Automatic Wire Numbering command, all is well.
  
  Option D: Create a small AutoLISP utility that you can run against your project drawing set to do any of the above options automatically in a "batch" mode.
  
  Options A,B, and C look tedious, but option D looks like it would be fun. Let's do D and set it up to automatically erase existing wire numbers for wire networks that include a cable marker symbol.
  
  
  Option D: AutoLISP Utility - Making use of the "API"
  
  Here it is. A utility that is quite small due to calls into the AutoCAD Electrical API. This greatly simplifies creating this tool. Download a copy here.
  
  
  
  
  How it works
  
  The approach used here is to first extract a selection set of all "cable marker" block inserts. This is done by using a wild-card match on the cable marker block names. Then it goes into a "while" loop and process each block marker, one at a time. For each one, the block marker is processed to find connected LINE wires. Then, for each wire connection, it search for and erases any wire number tied to it.
  
  That's it. A handful of calls into the AutoCAD Electrical "API" makes it pretty simple.
  
  To run (single drawing)...
  
  1. APPLOAD the above utility
  2. For single drawing, type cbl_no_wnum [Enter] at the AutoCAD command prompt.
  
  To run in batch mode...
  
  One way is to use AutoCAD Electrical's "Project-wide Utilities" command. Make sure you save the utility to a folder that is somewhere in the ACAD path. Then enter the following into the edit box as shown below:
  
  (load "cbl_no_wnum.lsp")(c:cbl_no_wnum)
  
  Select OK, select the project drawing to process, and that's it.
  
  
  
  Results!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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