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Importing Wire Types from a master schematic - AutoCAD Electrical
March 3, 2009, 12:33 PM Nate Holt
Autodesk's Yook-Mei Chong came up with a cool utility for ACE2009 to automate a sometimes-tedious schematic set-up task!
Let's say you're creating a new schematic drawing to add to an existing AutoCAD Electrical project. It is going to be similar in function to an existing drawing where you've set up a number of custom "wire types". What you'd like to do is just pull all of those wire types over to your new drawing and get moving.
What Mei has done is create a cool little AutoLISP utiltiy to do this. Her utility prompts you to browse to the target "source" drawing. It reads the existing wire types on that drawing and re-creates them in the active drawing.
She also created a project-wide version of this utility. You browse to the target "source" drawing that has the set of desired wire types defined. The utility then pushes these out to all of the selected drawings in the active AutoCAD Electrical project. Seems to work well [but use at your own risk!!].
You can download this utilty here: files/24701_24800/24761/file_24761.lsp and rename it copywiretype.lsp.
To use:
Download and APPLOAD the above file
Then, to pull a set of wire types to the active drawing...
1. Type COPY_WT [Enter] at command line.
2. Browse to the target "source" drawing that carries the desired wire types.
Or, to pull a set of wire types into all selected dwgs of the active project...
1. Type COPY_WT_PROJ [Enter] at command line.
2. Browse to the target "source" drawing that carries the desired wire types.
3. Select the drawings in the active project that are to be updated with these new wire types. Hit OK.
This utility is just a plain AutoLISP tool that makes some calls into the AutoCAD Electrical "API". Please feel free to modify / enhance it. For example, maybe you want to add an option to only pull in certain wire types. Or perhaps you want it to list the available wire types and then you select which ones to pull in. Use your imagination!
Comments
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May 14, 2009 01:47 AM Shankar J
Is there any tool/options to change the 'Layer Name Format', which by defualt I could see %C_%S. I want this format to be changed to %S%1%2. Is it possible? Thanks Shankar
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February 8, 2010 04:49 AM Nick Hall
I've updated this,tool, adding a command to consolidate all wire types across a project. I can't see how to upload my modifications, but if you want it, contact me - nick dot hall at altasystems dot co dot uk
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