Quicker Insertion of parent/child components?

[tjshaffer]

     Are any of you Acad Electrical specialists aware of a way to automate the process of inserting parent /child schematic components whereby once you insert the parent, the program will automatically prompt you for the child to insert?  For example, the user inserts a parent control relay coil (HCR1) and by doing that AcadE already knows that a child relay contact (HCR21) will follow and generates a dialog box or list to choose the contact from?  That may be asking too much from the
out-of-the-box AcadE and may have to be written as VBA or LISP. Anyone ever heard or seen this type of menu automation or something similar?

[dougmcalexander]

There is already a similar function for cable markers, which are generally inserted next to one another on the same drawing.  But since you could attach a NO, NC, Form-C, or even a convertible contact to a relay coil, it would take some additional code for the software to predict what you need.  For example, it could read the Pin List from the Pin List Database and use a lookup table that interprets the first number of each Pin List group (i.e. 1,3,4 is a normally-open contact with terminations marked as 3 and 4) to determine which symbol to suggest.  Of course if you need to insert the child contacts on a different drawing, you would need to use the existing method to insert the contact and associate it to its parent coil.

If you would like to discuss the possibility of having a custom add-in created to support this functionality, feel free to contact me for a quote.