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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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Recovering Corrupted Wiring in AutoCAD Electrical
April 5, 2007, 03:50 AM Nate HoltAutoCAD Electrical is pretty forgiving when it comes to using regular AutoCAD or AutoCAD/LT to edit the "smart" schematics. When you pass your design to the customer who does not have AutoCAD Electrical installed, he can (fairly) safely edit components with any attribute editing command, can copy components and use LINE entities for new wiring (as long as the lines are on a "wire layer"), and so on. But there is one area that is pretty risky... using regular AutoCAD's COPY command for copying wiring and wire numbers.
The reason is that there are invisible "Xdata" pointers carried on wire line segments. These point to the wire network's wire number block insert. The pointer's value uses the wire number block insert's "handle" number. So, each wire segment in a numbered wire network will carry a single Xdata pointer back to that network's wire number block insert.
Misuse of AutoCAD COPY command
Now, here's where the problem shows up... Copying wiring that already has these wire number Xdata pointers will trigger those copied wires to point back at the original "uncopied" wire number. This happens even if a copy of the wire number block insert is included in the copied entity selection set.
Is there any recovery other than erasing this stuff and re-inserting using AutoCAD Electrical? There may be an option.
Here's a little utility that may be able to restore the pointer relationship for copied wiring. You APPLOAD this tool and then type RESTORE_WNUM [Enter] at the command line. Pick pairs consisting of one copied wire number and one copied wire segment that the copied wire number is supposed to go with. See if this works for you.
A full listing of the AutoLISP utility is show below, and you can download a full working copy here.
How it works
The utility prompts you to select a line wire entity and a wire number block insert that should tie in to that line segment. The block selection is filtered on the block naming convention for wire numbers, "WD_WN*". If the selection includes a LINE with a wire number Xdata pointer value (Xdata appname is "VIA_WD_WNPTR") and a wire number block insert, then it compares the Xdata pointer value with the block insert's handle number. On a match, all is well.
But, if mismatch, then the utility extracts a list of all wire segments in the network. It goes through and updates each wire segment's Xdata pointer to point at the copied wire number block insert.
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