Inserting panel footprints with multiple blocks (assemblies)

[Anonymous]

As far back as AutoCAD Electrical 2010 (currently using 2013), I've noticed that when inserting some panel foot prints of enclosures that some of these footprints will insert several blocks. These multiple block inserts are to show both the inside and door of the enclosure or the front and sides.

What's interesting is that when the insertion happens, the block showing the inside of the panel becomes a normal "smart" AutoCAD Electrical footprint block. Right clicking on this block brings up the AutoCAD Electrical menu for editing the block attributes. The other blocks are now "dumb" plain AutoCAD blocks. The nice part about this is that if you don't need the sides of the door, you can delete the blocks. Or if you do need these blocks you can move them or edit them separtately from the "main" block.  It's a great feature.

Here's my problem: I can't for the life of me figure out how to make my own! The blocks where this works are the pre-defined blocks that come with the installations. I'm mainly using Hoffman enclosures and the blocks have "ASSY" on the file name. Inside the DWGs, there are separte blocks for each view and usually the P_TAG1 attribute is embedded in one of the blocks.  I've tried duplicating this but when ever I insert the block through AutoCAD Electrical, it either doesn't work at all and the insertion doesn't result in an AutoCAD Electrical smart block, or everything is one big AutoCAD Electrical smart block.

Any help with how to create these would be great.

[rhesusminus · Accepted solution]

If you take a look inside the footprint lookup database, you'll see that some blocknames have a "*" in fornt of them.

This means that AutoCAD will explode the block upon insertion.

This also mean that if you're going to create your own version of this, you'll have to create the blocks "inside" the drawing og the cabinet. So that when you insert your drawing it will only explode the first "layer" of blocks.

I hope this was understandable and helpful.

[Anonymous]

Wow, thank you so much. I never understood why those asterisks were there.  In fact I had one part work correctly because I copied on of those entries and I could not get it to work again. I only wish this was document some where in the creation of panel footprints.  Well thanks again.