LONGER FIELD LENGTHS FOR ATTRIBUTES...

[darrell.l.gregg]

It sure would be nice to have an installation/location code that has enough field length so that one can make it reasonably readable.

In my company we find ourselves having to create very imaginitive acronyms on the fly for the various installations/locations we have to use on very large projects.

Longer field lengths for many of the fields would be useful.

[dougmcalexander]

Installation and Location codes come from the DIN, and later IEC, standard.  The idea is to use abbreviations.  In Germany most of our Installation and Location codes were 1-4 characters at the most.  In DIN/IEC components can be identified with a device ID that includes =INST+LOC-TAG.  Long codes could cause the device ID to be obnoxiously long.  Of course you can set AutoCAD Electrical project properties to suppress the INST and/or LOC if they match the drawing default and that will help., but then any device that is not located in the drawing default INST/LOC would still have a long ID. It is best to use a Location Box and let the INST/LOC be placed next to the box, for all devices inside the perimeter of the box.  The Location Box dialog can automatically suppress the INST/LOC attributes for all devices within the box to make the drawing look much cleaner.

[darrell.l.gregg]

Making the field lengths larger won't affect anyone who is using smaller letter combinations. It would not make tags any larger than what they typed in, if you are using inst/loc in tagging then obviously you would not be able to use the larger field length unless you liked obnoxiously long tagnames.

Just because the field was made larger doesn't mean you have to use all the length...

But for those of us that do not use inst/loc in our component tagging.... it would be a very nice thing to have much longer field lengths for inst and loc.

And I'll tell ya why:

We use the inst/loc fields in the "wire from to" report to generate a pull list...

Those installation and location codes appear in the report. Currently they have to be a series of acronyms (abbreviations) that for some of our inst/loc combinations become meaningless as they are so abbreviated that they don't make any sense any longer.

Example:

Installation: Upper_Deck_Class2_Div2_Area_1

Location: Main_Drive_MCC_Enclosure_1A

Neither of these codes will fit in the current field length...

So now they hvae to somehow be abbreviated.... and this is where trouble happens... 4 different people would abbreviate those two codes in potentially 4 differnt ways.

Installation: UDC2D2A1 is sort of a meaningless code for anyone but the drafter... anyone else reading that document probably won't know what that is until you provided a key, or a lookup table or something...

It's hard to standardize when you are dealing with the unkown, we don't always know the arrangement of our customer's sites... and we don't name the areas in their site, they do.

Longer field lengths would ENABLE more flexibilty with how the inst/loc could be used.

It wouldn't harm anyone using shorter codes and using those shorter codes in their component tagging.