Panel Report Formats - DESC1, DESC2, DESC3 not working

[dmoore]

I'm trying to develop a drawing package with the look and feel of a traditional ACAD drawing package for our company. We put BOM's on our drawing. I'm trying to use the desc1, 2, and 3 field but it appears that even though its an option in the report format, they always come in blank. Is there a way to fix this problem? I noted a post by runcontrol on OCT 17 06 titled "BOM Problems" in it Jared from Autodesk suggested using the COMPONENT report. I looked at it, and it will almost work, but I need a QTY field that the BOM report has, and the COMPONENT report doesn't.

[userlevel6]

Hope I'm not misunderstanding you, but DESC1, DESC2 and DESC3 of course must be used in your symbols? And you do realize these have nothing to do with the DESCRIPTION field, which is supplied by the parts database. If the part isn't found, or the DESCRIPTION for the part isn't filled in, you'll get blanks there. DESC1, DESC2, & DESC3 don't describe the part; they are intended to describe the function, such as the DESC1 value E-STOP as opposed to the part DESCRIPTION of something like "MUSHROOM HEAD PB, 1N.C." for example...

[dmoore]

Thank you for your reply. Yep, I understand all of that. I was running a test drawing and made sure that the blocks that I was using had the desc1, 2 and 3 attributes inside the blocks, and that they were populated. My company's boms use more abbreviated descriptions than the DESCRIPTION field has, and also, on my test drawing it wasn't a reliable field to use as far as content goes. I've started using the user1 field in the component library to input the info that I'd like the customer to see on the BOM. I renamed the field to "Part Name" in my Report Format, and now its working nicely.

As far as the desc1, 2 and 3 goes - I don't think that they work in a Panel BOM report. Its funny because its an option. Have you tried it? Does it work for you? By the way, I'm running ACADE 2008.

Thanks again.

[Anonymous]

It seems like there might be an issue with these values if they are on xdata
rather than attributes. I will verify this and log the issue. It looks like
for now if you want to use these in a Panel BOM, the values would have to be
on attributes. If you want these attributes added when the panel footprint
is inserted you could add them to the appropriate template. For more
information regarding this, see the help topic "Use panel templates" under
the Panel Layout->Footprint/Terminal Insertion section.

Pat Murnen

wrote in message
news:5773416@discussion.autodesk.com...
Thank you for your reply. Yep, I understand all of that. I was running a
test drawing and made sure that the blocks that I was using had the desc1, 2
and 3 attributes inside the blocks, and that they were populated. My
company's boms use more abbreviated descriptions than the DESCRIPTION field
has, and also, on my test drawing it wasn't a reliable field to use as far
as content goes. I've started using the user1 field in the component
library to input the info that I'd like the customer to see on the BOM. I
renamed the field to "Part Name" in my Report Format, and now its working
nicely.

As far as the desc1, 2 and 3 goes - I don't think that they work in a Panel
BOM report. Its funny because its an option. Have you tried it? Does it
work for you? By the way, I'm running ACADE 2008.

Thanks again.

[userlevel6]

I don't use it, but I tested it after reading your post and found the information there. It works. Then, it might work because my block library mostly contains attributes for these fields.

As I edit & build blocks in our library, I try to make sure they all contain appropriate attributes. I prefer to be able to have the option to make mass-changes using global attribute editing techniques. I'm sure there are things I haven't learned to do yet with ACAD-E that I already have a way to do using standard ACAD, LISP & SCRIPTs; but I've noticed that there are certain things ACAD-E won't do without the appropriate attributes. Try globally changing the part number of all terminals in a drawing, or across all drawings, for example. If all the terminal block symbols have attributes, this is easily done globally using -ATTEDIT. Put it in a .scr file, and you can run it across the entire project using Project Wide utilties - Run Command Script.

Am I missing something, or does this operation otherwise normally require the designer to run Edit Component on each terminal in the schematic? If not, someone please teach me the "modern" way. 😉 By the way, I am aware you can export to a spreadsheet, make your changes, and re-import, but that seems to me more complicated than just staying in ACAD and using -ATTEDIT.

[Anonymous]

I tried reproducing this again and I am not able to. So I think what I said
about xdata is probably not right. Try the following - exit AcadE. Delete
the bompnl.set file if it exists in your User folder (default c:\documents
and settings\{username}\Application Data\Autodesk\AutoCAD Electrical
{version}\R#\enu\Support\User). Delete the project's scratch database also
in the user folder with the same name as the project and .mdb extension.
Enter AcadE and rerun the report. Go into Change Report Format and add
DESC1. If it still does not show can you send me some drawings? My direct
email is pat.murnen@autodesk.com

Pat Murnen

wrote in message
news:5773416@discussion.autodesk.com...
Thank you for your reply. Yep, I understand all of that. I was running a
test drawing and made sure that the blocks that I was using had the desc1, 2
and 3 attributes inside the blocks, and that they were populated. My
company's boms use more abbreviated descriptions than the DESCRIPTION field
has, and also, on my test drawing it wasn't a reliable field to use as far
as content goes. I've started using the user1 field in the component
library to input the info that I'd like the customer to see on the BOM. I
renamed the field to "Part Name" in my Report Format, and now its working
nicely.

As far as the desc1, 2 and 3 goes - I don't think that they work in a Panel
BOM report. Its funny because its an option. Have you tried it? Does it
work for you? By the way, I'm running ACADE 2008.

Thanks again.

[Anonymous]

After looking at the drawing you sent I found the issue. It is not related
to xdata vs. attributes. There is an issue with not showing the DESC1-3
values in the report if the Tag value is blank on the footprint. The
workaround is to add values to the footprint Tags. You can hide them or turn
the layer off if you don't want to see them.

I will log this issue. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Pat Murnen

wrote in message
news:5773416@discussion.autodesk.com...
Thank you for your reply. Yep, I understand all of that. I was running a
test drawing and made sure that the blocks that I was using had the desc1, 2
and 3 attributes inside the blocks, and that they were populated. My
company's boms use more abbreviated descriptions than the DESCRIPTION field
has, and also, on my test drawing it wasn't a reliable field to use as far
as content goes. I've started using the user1 field in the component
library to input the info that I'd like the customer to see on the BOM. I
renamed the field to "Part Name" in my Report Format, and now its working
nicely.

As far as the desc1, 2 and 3 goes - I don't think that they work in a Panel
BOM report. Its funny because its an option. Have you tried it? Does it
work for you? By the way, I'm running ACADE 2008.

Thanks again.

[jcrispino3]

Hoping to bump this back to life...I'm having  similar issue with not getting DESC1-3 to appear on my nameplate reports. I thought it was that the tagname attribute was empty (as described in the old posts), but I tried adding P_TAG1 to the footprint and it's still not listing the DESC attributes in the report.