Some customers like to show the same terminal 2, 3, or 4 times throughout their schematic for clarity. For example, you have terminal TB1:5 on sheet 5 and you connect one wire to it, for a branch circuit. The other side of the terminal is still available, and you could even connect a second wire to the same side. But the circuit that you wat to connect to the other side is on sheet 7. If you insert a terminal on sheet 7 it will automatically index up to number 6. This is normally great, but in this case you want to connect to the other side of TB1:5. If you override the software and change the 6 to a 5 the drawing will look the way you wish. However, when you open Terminal Strip Editor, you will see two terminals labeled TB1:5, and your BOM will have an increased quantity reflecting the additional terminal number 5. This of course is not what the customer was expecting.
I normally connect a second wire to TB1:5 and use a source/destination arrow combination to connect to the circuit on sheet 7. This is what I call "Design Reality", because it accuraely reflects what I really want the panel shop to do. However, some customers think that this approach makes the drawing appear too busy, plus they don't want to flip back from sheet 7 to sheet 5 to see what terminal the wire came from.
So my idea is to allow a terminal to be shown multiple times, perhaps up to 4 times, since we can connect two wires to each side legally. Do this by allowing the user to repeat the same terminal number and check a box labeled "Duplicate", next to the terminal number field (see attached image). You might even think of it as designating this repeated terminal as a "child" of the first TB1:5. The software interprets this to mean that this isn't a physical repeat of TB1:5 but a logical repeat of TB1:5. Also allow the user to make Internal and External wiring assignments to these duplicates, so Terminal Strip Editor will display the wire annotations in the order desired. But be sure that Terminal Strip Editor understands that these "duplicates" are still part of one physical block, so only show terminal 5 once in the graphical strip, but with up to two wire annotations per side.
