Adding project name to title block

[Anonymous]

Ideally I would like my title block to have a field that default fills with the Project Folder name for the complete set of drawings. I am trying to make this as fool proof as possible and the project folder and individual drawing names are the only things that get updated. Is there someway to achieve this by changing one setting in one place and not having to update each page individually? I am in AutoCAD Electrical 2016. 

[jseefdrumr · Accepted solution]

There is no way to make this happen to existing drawings without changing each one. However, you could make use of the Swap/Update Block command to take a lot of the pain away.

The first thing you'd need to do is add an attribute to your title block for this purpose. Then, you will have to go through the Title Block Setup process again, so that the new attribute gets mapped to the title block.

Once that's done, you would use Swap/Update Block to push the refreshed title block to all drawings, on a project-by-project basis, replacing the older title block.

Then, for each project, you would need to go to the descriptions by right clicking on the project in the Project Manager. Add the name of the file folder name that you want to get onto your title block in the proper line.

Finally, run Title Block Update across the project. That should do it. From there, you'd have repeat this final step for every project.

As for new drawings, all you would have to do is be sure that you have the proper line added to the project descriptions, and the title block should come in with everything already there.

Alternatively, you could just add an attribute that contains a field value that does what you want, but I don't know how to set up a field to get that info. There might also be a Diesel expression you could enter into the field that would do that. Either way, if you used a field in your new attribute, then you wouldn't have to redo you title block setup. But, you would still have to push the refreshed title block out to all the existing ones, update, etc.

Hope this helps,

[TRLitsey]

Hi there,

This may or may not be helpful to you but here goes....

I think you will find a tutorial or general guild line for creating a Smart Title Block.  Once you have created your project with the Smart Title Block, these tools will be useful to you.  When you open the tool dialog be sure to take a peek at the window specific Help button to see what features are available in the dialog.

Good luck

 

 

 

[Anonymous]

I have followed your advice here and it seems simple enough, however it looks like I have to do a title block setup as well as a title block update after I have copied the drawings into a new project and changed the description for the project folder. Does that seem correct or is there a way to only update without having to establish the connection between Line 1 and that attribute each time?

[jseefdrumr]

The title block setup should only happen once, it would be the first thing you need to do.

After you have a new (revised, actually) title block that is ready for use, it needs to be pushed out to existing drawings. I neglected to mention before that if you have the title block present in your template files, then those will also need to get the new title block. But that would only matter for when you create new drawings from a template.

At that point, once you've copied existing drawings into a new project - keeping in mind that those existing drawings should have already received the new title block - all you should have to do is a title block update for the project.

If this isn't happening for you, it might mean that your new title block isn't making it into the drawings. Can you describe how you are replacing your title block? Are you using the Swap/Update tool? There are some options available in that dialog box that could be affecting this.

[Anonymous]

What would normally happen is we would take existing dwg files from an existing project, copy them to a new folder, rename them, and then start a new project folder in AutoCAD and add those new, renamed drawings. Doing it this way forced me to do another title block setup before the update would affect the drawings. Any ideas to achieve the same results in fewer steps would be appreciated. 

[jseefdrumr]

It sounds like the drawings you copied didn't have a new title block in them. That has to happen first. Or actually, third, since the first thing is to edit the title block to add your new attribute, and the second is to swap out the old title blocks with the new one.