I'm looking into streamlining wiring diagram creation in Autocad using standard tool palettes. Unfortunately, we don't use Inventor at my workplace to do real harness modeling and drawing creation (Solidworks routing is living up to it's lack of hype). I'm looking into how easy it is to maintain these wiring diagrams over a product's life (Say a connector changes, etc.). Replace has worked well, but I'm trying to see if you can automatically update blocks on another drawing sheet should the block design change (adding a feature to it, etc.). If I update the block on the template the tool palette pulls from, how can I easily update the existing blocks on the drawings I'm using them in?
This thread doesn't seem to help me: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-2013-2014-2015-2016-2017/tool-palette-updating/m-p/5756781#M89...
Thanks,
Aaron
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Hi @Anonymous,
Have you considered inserting the part as an Xref instead?
In that case changing any thing within the reference file will happen automatically in all drawings..
You may also add the changes in reference as a new visibility state, so that you maintain some control over what sheets change and what don't.. (In that case though you will need to change the visibility state of the inserted xrefs manually within the changed sheets)..
Regards
Hey @elshawadfy,
Thanks for the tip. I looked into using Xrefs. The concern with this is we have lots of little connectors in the tool palette I'm setting up. It's nice to control this from a read only template and just drag and drop. Xrefs would require a drawing for each of our parts, which seems to only make our drawing management issue a little worse. Any other ideas? Thank you!
Aaron
Dean,
Here's my problem: Need to easily update wiring diagrams. Connectors and other parts are currently set up as blocks in a template drawing from which a tool palette references.
Otherwise, I will generate a similar block (instead of updating existing) and just do BLOCKREPLACE.
Hopefully that helps clarify.
Aaron
Dean,
We do have multiple layouts for a project (project being a product line). However, we reuse parts across all product lines, so if a mass change occurs throughout our factory, I wanted to see if that could be an automatic update.
So you've answered my question - XREFS are the way to go. I'll provide this option as well as BLOCKREPLACE. To me, it seems like better data management for us to have one template with all blocks and we replace as necessary.
Thanks for all your help.
Aaron
Hi @Anonymous!
If your worries are more about having to create all these files, you may find some of these lisps useful, they all basically extract all blocks of a certain file to separate files.. so you can apply them to your template to get out your block files..
- https://lispbox.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/export-wblock-all-blocks-in-drawing-in-one-click/
- http://www.cadforum.cz/cadforum_en/download.asp?fileID=457
Regards 🙂
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