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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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Smart Title Block Swapping with AutoCAD Electrical
March 22, 2007, 02:57 PM Nate HoltAutoCAD Electrical has a frequently used utility to do block swapping. It has many uses when dealing with schematic symbols.
For example, you need to replace dozens of red standard pilot light schematic symbols with red press-to-test pilot light symbols. Just run AutoCAD Electrical's Block Swap utility, make the appropriate selections from the dialog, and in a few moments, all instances across your multi-drawing project set are updated with the new symbol.
This tool is tuned to work with schematic symbols and the attribute names expected to be found on these symbols. But users are finding other uses for this tool, for example, swapping out entire title block/drawing borders.
It can be used to do this but may result in some unexpected results. When the Block Swap utility runs into attribute names that it is not expecting to find (i.e. attributes not commonly found on AutoCAD Electrical's schematic symbols), it may move these attributes to a "MISC" miscellaneous layer during the swap.
Here's a way to recover from this - to restore the title block attributes to some layer other than MISC. You can post-process your swapped title block with this utility. You enter the "From" layer name (ex: "MISC") and the "Move to" layer name (ex: "0") and pick on the title block. In a few moments, all the attributes found on the MISC layer are moved to layer "0".
How to Use
1. APPLOAD the attached utility
2. Type ATTR_LAY_CHANGE [Enter] at command line.
3. Select the "Existing" layer name and the "Move to" layer name.
4. Select the block or blocks to process.
How does this thing work?
Here is the key part of the attached utility. You're prompted to select the swapped blocks to post-process. Then the program cycles through each block you pick, finds attributes on the block, and checks the current layer assignment. If the attribute's layer name matches the "old" name you selected, then it flips that attribute to your "new" layer name.
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