PLCIO Export To Excel

[nathan.averett]

I am trying to find a good way to update/manage/print PLCIO addresses in my schematics. I use the standalone PLCIO symbol with a TAG2 attribute, so they link to the parent symbols that were generated by parametric PLC. I can get the list of available addresses and pins from the parametric PLC in the Excel export. I plan to modify the PLCIO addresses in the export file and then import the sorted addresses back into the schematics. Is there a way to sort the standalone PLC points in the order they appear in the drawings? If I could get the line reference into the export file, I could sort on the drawing name, then the reference. I modified the wd_xls_all_template.xlt file to try to include the (REF) field like the COMP tab has, but it does not populate in the PLCIODESC or PLCMOD tabs. I have tried both REF and (REF). As a bonus, is there any way to make the REF field display as I have my project setup for XREFs, %A%B%N?

I also need to find a way to link the PLCIO point with the component device tag, e.g. PLC point I0200.00 is connected to sensors PX123456 for my IO list. 

Currently, I am doing all of this using excel VBA to pull all the block attributes into a table and sort based on the block insert point. Since my wires are numbered based on the PLC IO address, I use the wire numbers in X?TERM attributes to tie the component tag to the PLC IO address. The downside to this method is it is terribly slow to read all the blocks, then write them back to the drawings. For some reason, doing this also causes some attributes to become misaligned, and of course I have to manually rebuilt the project database since I have modified things outside the tool set. I would greatly prefer to use the AutoCAD Electrical tools to do all this if possible.

I am using AutoCAD 2020.

[rhesusminus · Accepted solution]

I'm pretty sure (95%) you'll have to continue doing your custom thing here to make it work like you want it.

[nathan.averett]

I was afraid of that. I have been poking around at the scratch databases and think I can speed things up by querying that instead of the drawings through Excel. Thank you for your reply. 

[rhesusminus]

Since you know how to program, you should find what you seek there 🙂