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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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Customizing the Drawing Index Sheet - AutoCAD Electrical
June 1, 2007, 01:23 PM Nate HoltA customer likes AutoCAD Electrical's ability to auto-generate an index table listing all drawings in a project. But he wants to leave some "gaps" in the listing where appropriate. For example, maybe the 3-phase motor control drawings begin at sheet number 10, end at 16, and he skips to sheet 20 to begin the PLC I/O drawings. He'd like to leave empty spots in the generated index for the "future" sheets 17 through 19.
This is where a report "User post" can fill in the gap (or create a gap in this case).
Before:
Here's the default out-of-the-box sequence for generating a drawing list report (using the demo project that comes with AutoCAD Electrical - but with the last drawing's SHEET number bumped up to create a gap in the listing):
1. Right click on the project name in the AutoCAD Electrical Project Manager window...
2. Run the report and let it display...
3. ... and select the "Put on Drawing" button. And here we are. It's cool but note that there is no gap in the table between sheet 8 and sheet 12. We'd really like to see a gap in the listing.
Solution: create a modified "User Post" utility - After:
The solution is to modify the Drawing List Report's "User Post" utility to automatically force gaps in the report corresponding to gaps in the SHEET number assignments.
1. Download sample User Post utility dwglst.lsp here and supporting dialog dcl file dwglst.dcl here. Put both into your "c:\program files\autodesk\acade 200x\support\" folder (make backups first!).
... with these two modified files in place, the new sequence is this:
2. Run report and display as before.
3. When report display, select the "User Post" button on the right-hand lower part of the display dialog. The modified "user post" dialog pops up. Select the first option and enter in optional "ending" sheet number in the edit box. Hit OK.
4. Now select "Put on Drawing" button. Here it is, with gaps !
How it Works
Nearly all of AutoCAD Electrical reports have a "user post" option. This lets you post-process the report data to meet custom needs while the data is still displayed in the AutoCAD Electrical report dialog. When you hit the "user post" button, AutoCAD Electrical looks for an AutoLISP file with a name matching the report type. In this case (above), it is dwglst.lsp. If found, it passes a copy of the report data to this Lisp routine. Here is where you can then massage the data, reformat it, or whatever, and then ship it back to the report display.
So, in our example above, we modify the dwglst.lsp file and its supporting dialog support file dwglst.dcl to give us the "gap" option we want.
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