Greetings,

I am a Industrial Control Engineer new to a company that has poor revison control of all its Electrical documents.

We use both AutoCAD 2007 and AutoCAD LT 2008.

I am beginning to add the standard revision block to pre-existing drawings.

We have many sets of drawings , with each set containing 50+ sheets.

I have created a table in Revison Block area with DATALINK entries to keep track of all the revisons by project.

At this moment we have decided to update every sheet in document set to ensure that with a glance the latest revision ships with the equipment.   

Everything seems to be working ok, I can copy over the DATALINK table as block in batch mode to hundreds of documents.

Here is the catch.

The only data that changes ( for the moment) from sheet to sheet is the drawing name and sheet number.
I dont wanna create a DATALINK entry for each Drawing name and Sheet number.

Luckily our filename contains both the drawing name and sheet number.

I would like to create some kind of "BLOCK" that gets the filename and parses out the appropriate text to specific areas.

I can manually create a Text field with a REVDATE or DTEXT using Dynamic TEXT, but I cant figure out a way to have this information automatically load when placed.


Any thoughts on how to do this?

James Barry

 
 The DBCONNECT Command maybe you can use or EATTEXT Command.

Thanks for the suggestion, however I just discovered an interesting tidbit.

DATALINK is not available in ACAD 2007 and DBCONNECT/EATTEXT are not recognized in AUTOCAD LT 2008.

I should have checked that DATALINK was available in both AUTOCAD versions before developing my Revision System.

We have opted to have AUTOCAD LT 2008 for Electrical Engineering for cost reasons and maintain the single network license of AUTOCAD Inventor 11 / Mechanical 2007
for the rest of the business (building layout and simple mechanical part drafting).

I'll need to drop back and see what functions are compatible in both versions and see what I can do.

The goal is to "batch" update the revison block on multiple sets of drawings. This method needs to function in AUTOCAD LT 2008 and possible AUTOCAD 2007.

Thanks Again,

James

Hey all

I did a bit of research and ton of experimenting.

Sample File name 50686E01.dwg

Using a trick I discovered in CAD Tip # 5128:

Pasting %<\AcVar Filename \f "%fn6">% into AUTOCAD LT 2008 creates Dynamic Field MText.

Which creates 50686E01

That was easy ... CAD tips really help :)


Then I used AcDiesel to trim the string;

%<\AcDiesel $(substr, %<\AcVar Filename \f "%fn2">%, 8)>%

The page number is now extrated from the file name

The only downside, it wont update dynamically. I assume it has to nested commands in LT.

You are right - nested fields cannot be entered this way in AutoCAD LT.