topic Re: How to constrain blocks in dwg...Group? in AutoCAD Forum

How to constrain blocks in dwg...Group?

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 18:39:39 GMT

Greetings,

I haven't worked with ACAD Groups much, and I have a question about group behavior that I'm hoping someone can help with.

Consider a drawing which contains several blocks. Each block has editable attributes. I need the relative positions of the blocks to remain constant, so I group them together using the GROUP command and give the group a name.

Is there any way to access the attributes of the individual blocks in the group for editing...without ungrouping the group? I'm not finding a way to do that. The GROUPEDIT command lets me add, remove or rename objects within the group, but not edit or extract attribute values of blocks within the group.

The behavior that I'm finding in that respect is the same as if the blocks were nested together in a composite block. The individual block attribute values cannot be edited without exploding the composite block or going into block editor.

If it's not possible using groups or nested blocks, is there another way to constrain two blocks geometrically, yet still have their attributes accessible and editable at the drawing level?

Thank you. Have a great weekend.

Erik

Re: How to constrain blocks in dwg...Group?

3wood — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 21:45:57 GMT

There is a useful toggle switch in AutoCAD to control ON and OFF of GROUP.

CTRL+SHIFT+A

Just use this to turn GROUP off so you can edit the attributes. Then use it again to retrieve previous grouped status.

Re: How to constrain blocks in dwg...Group?

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 22:13:49 GMT

Thank you. That's a cool feature I didn't know about.

After hearing from some other forums as well, I've decided to use geometric constraints to keep my blocks positioned and aligned with each other while still keeping the attributes available for editing.

Thanks,

Erik