Info on Autocad Electrical Revision Tracking

[Philippe_T]

I was wondering if it is possible to create revision drawings.

The way we used to work, is in the name of the actual file, we would put the revision number (ie: Project_Y_REVA.dwg), but now that we switched to the project style autocad electrical, I don;t see a way to do it without affecting my entire project.

We want to keep tracks of changes that we made...

Regards

Phil

[jbunch55]

Hey Phil,

We do the same at my company, so I was wondering if you came up with a solution for this?

I need the filename to change once i change the Rev attribute on my titleblock.

[cbenner]

There is no way that I know of to automatically change the filename in Vault.  You would have to check them into the Vault and use the Rename function, but in Electrical projects, beware... the project may continue to look for the original filename.  This is a very sticky issue that I just ran into the other day.  I'm not sure there is a good way to do it without messing up your project.

As fdar as revision tracking, it all depends on how you are setting the revision.  Are you just changing an attribute in your drawing titleblock?  Are you setting a revision property in the Project Descriptions?  Are you setting revision in the Vault based on a lifecycle state change?  What version and level of Vault are you using?  There are a number of different ways to do this, but I would need abit more information first.

[jbunch55]

Thanks for the quick response Chris.

Well as of now we are not using ACADE to make our schematics, we are just using basic ACAD.

We have Vault but haven't been using it for electrical schematics, we are using a networked folder system.

Present Summary:

As of now we have an attribute for the Rev, Sheet, and the Dawning number all in the titleblock.

So we use a lisp that saves the file in a working folder and renames the file with the REV and Sheet number added to the Drawing Number. Ex 7XXXXX_A2

Once we are done editing that rev we run a different lisp that saves it to a Read Only folder.

If we want to edit the drawing again we have to open it in Read Only and increase the Rev value and then run the first lisp that saves it into the working folder with a new file name. Ex 7XXXXX_B2.

So the answer is we are changing an attribute in the title block and using a lisp to do Rev control.

We are using Vault Basic 2013.

Im pretty confident that we need to move to Vault to use ACADE efficiently, but for now I think we need to do a combination of Vault and our present folder system. I think we will have to write some LISPs to get what we want.

Its tricky because we want to implement ACADE but we can't just go solely to Vault with such a huge database already setup. So we need to use vault but also keep populating the folder with the new drawings.

Sorry this is long.

I am just wondering if there is a fairly simple way of using vault and ACADE to do Rev control with our setup.

I think if this can be accomplished we can write a LISP to save the finished revs to our folder.

Thanks for the help,

[cbenner]

Simple,... no.  Very few things in Vault are simple. 

First thing to know is that if you use AcadE, the revision is set on the project and then from there populates your drawing titleblocks.  make sure you read up on how to set up titleblocks in AcadE, it's a completely different operation form normal Autocad.  So, without getting too deep into tutorials, you set the Revision in Vault, and map that to your electrical projects, which then sets it in your titleblock.

As far as your renaming scheme, I'm really not sure how that will work with either Vault or AcadE.  I'm fairly new to AcadE and the one time I tried renaming drawing files within a project and then Vaulting them.... it boogered up the entire thing.  I was close to chucking the entire project and starting over.  I strongly recomment you post this question on the Acad Electrical forum... there are folks out there with a lot more experience in this program than I.  I don't want to give you bad advice.