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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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Repeating In-line Wire Number Tags with Auto-update
February 11, 2007, 03:56 AM Nate HoltA neat suggestion... similar to instrumentation trace lines with embedded, repeating text to identify the line type. But in this case, the user wanted repeated wire number tags that auto-update as required. This is possible to do by hand. Use AutoCAD Electrical's in-line wire numbering and then manually placing extra wire number "copies" (with the "Copy Wire Number Inline" command) at intervals along each wire segment. These are all "smart" in that if the wire number assignment for the wire network changes, all of the inline wire numbers update as well. They even auto-stretch or compress the gap in the wire to accommodate changing wire number text string length!
But, wouldn't it be cool to create a little custom tool to pop these in automatically and avoid the tedious manual process? You would just pick on a numbered wire network... the extra in-line wire number copies would automatically pop in at fixed intervals.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
Here's a little AutoLISP utility that might do the job. It makes some calls into the AutoCAD Electrical Application Programming Interface, the "API", documented under the AutoCAD Electrical HELP system > API. Download it here and give it a try.
1. Download utility
2. APPLOAD it
3. Type WNUM_REPEAT_INLINE [Enter] at command line
4. Pick the wire segments you want to process. In they go!
Now, let's test...
Pop a fuse into one of the wires. Note that the down-stream wire numbers automatically update to the next unused wire number!
Manually edit the downstream wire number to be a longer text string. Note that the embedded wire numbers not only update but the wire gap widens to accommodate the wider string! This is all standard AutoCAD Electrical behavior.
Final Non-Caution
Don't be afraid to modify this utility to make it do other cool stuff. This can be fun!
UPDATE: oops, original version only worked on ACE2008. New version uploaded that should be okay for any version. Sorry!
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