Cross Referencing customisation

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I'm having difficulty trying to get cross-references to do what I need them to do. A couple of issues anyway.

Issue 1: My components on the 3 phase schematics are referencing themselves back to where they appear on the single line diagrams. I don't want these references in there, I only want the references which are relevant to the schematics. Is there a way to change this permanently? I mean, I can edit each component and manually delete the unwanted reference, but as soon as the project is refreshed, the references re-appear.

Issue 2. The contactor coils on the 3 phase schematics are cross-referencing to every single contact of the contactor, which is in effect tripling up on every reference. For example, if the 3 contacts of the contactor are at [3B], instead of just this being displayed, I'm getting [3B], [3B], [3B] one for each contact, even though it's all the same device. Is there a way that Autocad electrical will recognise the parent contact and 2 subsequent child contacts as one component and therefore give me just the one cross-reference at the coil?

Any help would be much appreciated. I've been through all the help menus looking for some information, but can't seem to find anything that relates to these issues.
Thanks again.

Cliff

[dougmcalexander]

1. AutoCAD Electrical doesn't officially support intelligent single-line diagrams at this time. I have however made it work to a large extent. You might try adding the WDTAGALT attribute to the 3-line and 1-line symbols and let them alternately reference one another as peers. Study peer-to-peer relationships in the Advanced Productivity section of Electrical Help. This is feature is intended to link schematic components to the pneumatic, hydraulic, or P&ID equivalents.

2. The reason you are seeing 3 cross-references is because there are technically 3 child contacts that just so happen to form the 3-phase contacts of a motor starter. The three cross-references happen to be the same because the 3 contacts happen to be in the same location of the drawing. But they could just as well be split across multiple pages. If you set AcadE to display graphical cross-reference symbols you will see how it shows each of the three contacts of the contactor complete with terminal designations and location information. See the attached screen shot.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Doug,

I realise that its referencing each of the contacts in the contactor, but usually, for a 3 phase contactor I'd just use the one reference at the coil. I have managed to get around this by building my own contactor symbol so all contacts are seen as the one unit. Any auxiliaries are still referencing as per normal, but my main contactor just gets given the one reference, which is what I wanted.

I also managed to remove the single line xrefs from my schematics, although this is a bit of a clunkier method I think. I just added a full stop to all of my single line tags. So MCB-Q1 became MCB-Q1. and so AE does not recognise them as the same component.
I didn't realize that AE wasn't meant to be used for single lines??? I've already created a library of single line blocks which I use often and I have found that it works as I'd expect it to.

Any way, thanks for the help.

Cliff

[dougmcalexander]

I do single-lines with AcadE by manually making the single line symbol match the tag of its 3-line equivalent. You will get an error popup but you can ignore it or turn off real-time error checking. By setting it up this way the catalog assignment, description text, etc. are all bi-directionally maintained. Of course I just insert the 1-pole circuit breaker symbol to be a single-line equivalent of the 3-line version. I thought if Adesk would give us a new kinf od WD_M block that designates a drawing as being a single-line drawing, then real-time error checking would not think it is an error when I have duplicate tags. I thought it would be nice if, to assign the tag to a single-line symbol, we could get a list of all 3-line device tags within the component family and vice versa if we are creating a 3-line drawing from a single-line. In other words, if I am on a 3-line drawing and want to reference the 1-line equivalent symbol I would click a button for a list of 1-line symbols of that family type, with INST, LOC, TAG, description lines, etc. and select the symbol I want to associate as a 1-line equivalent. Of course also being able to do this the other way around would be nice. AcadE already allows you to have a schematic symbol, a pneumatic equivalent, and a panel layout symbol that are all three seen as one device without duplicate tag error warnings, but it doesn't yet support a single-line peer of components in the same fashion. Maybe in the future huh?

Note: I actually have a project with pneumatics, single-line, 3-line, and panel layout with multi-directional updates possible. The WDTAGALT takes care of the pneumatic to schematic link, the 1-line and 3-line are manually linked by duplicating the tag, and of course the panel symbols already link intelligently. The only devices that AcadE doesn't currently link up without thinking you have duplicated tags is the 1-line diagram because this is not a native function in AcadE.