CADgneto

Mapping the User fields in AutoCAD Electrical to the Productstream Item Properties

User fields in AutoCAD Electrical can be used for a variety of different reasons in AutoCAD Electrical. They are used to display information that isn’t captured within the standard AutoCAD Electrical attributes. In this example we will show how the User 1 field in AutoCAD Electrical was used to display an internal part number that is being used to search for components.

1. We are going to assume that all of the user 1 fields in the AutoCAD Electrical database have been populated with the correct internal part number.

2. The next step is to setup the mapping between the Item Number field inside of product stream and the USER1 field that will come in from AutoCAD Electrical.

3. To do this we will go in to productstream and go into the administration settings under the items tab. Once we are here we will click on the mapping button located near the bottom of the dialog box.

4. In the mapping dialog box we want to click on the “files to item” tab. Underneath this tab we want to located item property called “Number”.

5. Once this property has been located we want to click on the add button. This will bring up a list of file properties we can map to.

6. From this list we want to locate the “User1” property. Once this property has been found we want to click on the add button to add it to the mapped properties list.

7. Once this has been done we are now ready to add our AutoCAD Electrical drawings into the vault and extract the User1 field into the item number field. The following is an example of the item that shows the User1 value as the item number.

I would like to Thank Anil Chauhan, a co-worker at SolidCAD, for providing me with this article to post.

CADgneto

Resetting project properties to the drawing.

In AutoCAD Electrical, we deal with many different setting that may be affected project wide, or just in an individual drawing. This next step will force us to move all drawing properties to be equal as the project properties, to meet the drawing standards across on all pages selected. The steps are very simple on how to make a project uses the same standard all across.

1. Activate the project
2. Select all drawing in the project
3. Right click on one of the drawing and select “Properties” – “Apply Project defaults”. As seen below.
4. The process will up date all drawing and if you were to compare a drawing to a project you would end with the same result no difference.

Now, if you do any project up date, you can be certain that all component tag, wire number and other settings will be the same across your project.

Standardize it

CADgneto

Comparing setting between drawing and project

Well it’s been a while since I’ve written something on my blogs, I guess the holidays are design for you to rethink your last month of work and promote the information to yourself. Now a lot of note have been written in the past to realize what should go on my blog, but now I have a couple of minute so I though I would come up with some quick subject. One that came to mind is how easy it is to corrupt a project setting inside a drawing. Now the idea be hide the project file, is that we change the information project wide and not drawing wide so that we can have constancy. As time goes a project keep growing and changes keep coming back and forth in the standard. Now because we’ve maid so many changes at the drawing property level we need to sit and reevaluate our project setting and make sure that all drawing matches.

This tool I’m about to show it something that I think we should all know and learn to use a lot. The project contains our original idea on how a component tags, or wire numbers or even ladder spacing should be keep. Now as we insert new drawings the information of the project gets attached to that DWG. But as we draw our circuit or even as we do our panel there are a couple of things that we notice should be changed. The modification gets done at the drawing property with out notifying the project. Now as the next drawing get inserted those setting of previous drawing are not followed because they were never update to the main project. Again those changes are being done but some component might be miss compare to previous so now we are at a stage were all drawing and project might be entirely different.

The tool is called setting compare. In other word you are going to compare the setting of a drawing (DWG) to its own project, by the way you can only do one drawing at a time, with this command. This tool, will checks all the setting in your “Drawing Properties” and compare them to the “Project Properties”. Those that are different will be shown. From this point you may read the result of each and select which is too keep and which you want to change.

Step to follow to get to this command.

Step 1
Activating the command, like AutoCAD there are always more then one way to skin the cat. I am big on the RMC (Right Mouse Click), as seen on Figure 1. You can also reach this command under the project drop down menu, Setting Compare.

Figure 1

Step 2
Once you’ve decided to compare a drawing, you will notice the difference between your drawing Properties to your Project, as seen in Figure 2. All you need to do is select one or more of them and tell it to either match the Project or Drawing. When I say multiple select, I mean that you can shift select or ctrl select and match to the appropriate setting.

Figure 2

Compare it

CADgneto

Surf the Bill of Material a.k.a. BOM

I offer you a quick article on a new feature in AutoCAD Electrical 2008. ACADe has great tools to help you travel from page to page in your project. You may move one page at a time or surf, by searching specific attribute (Component Tag, Catalog Number and Wires Number), and find a schematic or panel component. For this tool to work we had the option to right clicking on a specific component or activating the surfer tool by selecting the icon or drop down menu and type what we were looking for.

Now in 2008, you can do all these plus search in the BOM inserted in a drawing created by ACADe. The steps are simple please read the following:

1. Activate the surfer tool
2. Browse in your BOM and select the appropriate text
3. Then the surf box will appeared as followed
4. Select the component then “Go To”

Keep in mind, the selection that you do will grab more then the tags you selected.

Surf’s up

CADgneto

Manage your revision number

Autodesk Inventor 2008 now offer us a better option on how to manage the revision number with out having it repeating on all the sheet in our drawing file (idw). In the earlier releases, when a revision table was inserted the revision number would end up on all the sheets with the same number, why, because the revision number would be attached to the iProperties of the drawing. See Image below…

Now in Autodesk Inventor 2008 you may choose your revision number to be controlled by the sheet and not the idw. How do we manage individual sheet revision number, look at the following steps?

1. Select the revision table icon

2. The following pop up window will be as followed,

3. Select Active Sheet with Auto-Index, and also you have the option to go with Alpha or Numeric.

F.Y.I. You’ll notice now that the revision number doesn’t affect the original title block. Why, because the text parameter selected is still the drawing revision iProperties you must update or create a new title block with the sheet revision text parameter. As seen below,

4. Now your revision number is sheet base and not drawing based. If you select on edit sheet you will see there is a new section for revision number. (That where you can manually change the sheet number)

Extra information, this was the before…

This is the now…

Revise it,

Cadgneto

User specific vault working folder

Being an Application Specialist for the Mechanical Division of Autodesk software, you must know and learn Vault. Lately I’ve been implementing Vault and I’ve come to an interesting challenge. Here is the scenario of Company “A”, most of there employee had multiples Hard Drive and to challenge me they didn’t have the same letter drive for them to set up the working folder. I could not set the working folder to a specific lettered drive because not every body had the same one. A co-worker mentioned to me in the pass that he read something about it on the discussion group. I did a search on the subject and of course the answer was there, “Environment variables”. I created a variable on every users computer called Vault and specify the desired location, specified by the user.

Once the variable was created on all the users, I’ve log as an administrator of the vault and set the working folder to %Vault%, as seen below.

Multiple working Folder, it can be done.

CADgneto

AutoCAD Electrical 2008 is out (My new is late)

Why am I putting this article now? For some reason I can’t manage my time properly but I felt that I’ve been lacking in putting article. This week I will try to put a couple article plus this article will show you what is new in 2008. The list might seem short on the new command in AutoCAD Electrical 2008 but one thing is for sure, Autodesk finally have the terminal block working with the panel layout. Here are the new features:

- Autodesk DWG Product Recognition
- Surfable Reports
- Inserting Spare Terminals
- Direct to Terminal Wire Sequencing
- Multi-Level Terminals
- Terminal Jumpers

Check out the Autodesk website What's New

More to come,

Cadgneto

Can’t Create Text or Edit Text

Lately users of Autodesk Inventor 11, 10 or 9 have lost the creation of text in the idw files. This was a result of a hotfix brought by Microsoft. They are not to blame but it did create problem in Autodesk Inventor. To fix the issue we had to uninstall the Microsoft Hotfix KB918118 and then everything was back to normal. Now this solution can be put away, Autodesk has come up with a there own hotfix. Hmmmm hotfix for a hotfix, got to love the software business.

Here are the links to the Autodesk Hotfix solution.

Hotfix - Create or Edit Text in IDW Files After Applying Microsoft Hotfix KB918118

Please read the read me file before applying it.

Issue fixed,

CADgneto

Plotting a project to PDF in ACADe

When it comes to plotting a project to PDF in ACADe, there is a bug when you use the DWG to PDF.pc3. The bug is that it saves the drawing to “_YES.pdf” for all of them, in other word the last plot wins.

Now if we want to print an ACADe project to PDF, we must use publish in AutoCAD. Here are some steps to get the project plotted to PDF. (These step are for drawing on the model tab)

1. Create an empty drawing, to create a layout template.
2. Right click on the model and select page setup manager.
3. In page setup manager, create a new page setup and call it PDF

4. In the page setup select DWG to PDF (Section 1 below)
5. Choose your paper size (Section 2 below)
6. Choose your pen style and anything else that you need. (Section 3 below)
7. Click OK

8. Start Publish. (under the drop down menu files)

9. Uncheck the layout tab, under “Include when adding sheets”.
10. Add all your drawing to this publish
11. Highlight all the drawing and select import in the Page setup/3D DWF
12. Find the drawing that you saved with the PDF page setup and import it

13. Select the publish option
14. Relocate the location of where you want the PDF to be saved
15. Select OK

16. Click Publish

F.Y.I. These steps can be used in regular AutoCAD

PDF it

Cadgneto

Traveling through Viewport

Here is a subject that has been hitting me a lot lately. I know I haven’t updated this website in a while and I must say time is some thing that is precious and not enough of. Since this website is not free I have the obligation to find time. Well here is an easy one coming up. Lately Viewport inside of Viewport is becoming big for some reason but then everybody forgets on how to access one or the other. I though that I’d give you the forgotten secret.

This might have been written in the pass but I’d thought it’s time for the pass to come back, it doesn’t hurt right.

To move between Viewport is a lot easier then we think, all you need to do is activate a Viewport and select Ctrl-R. That’s it Ctrl-R travel between Viewport. It also works in the model view.

Bon Voyage

Cadgneto