Custom Circuit Boxes and Auto-Filling Labels

[LSkulley]

Good afternoon!

 

I've been poking at this for a few hours and I'm just hitting a wall.

 

I am trying to create a cable-plot for my theatre space that is easy to use. In the past, I have brute forced this using classes and layers, but lately, I've had some extra time that I can start to convert this into a format that works in 3D as well as being a more streamlined process. As such, I am starting with my cable boxes.

 

I have several different kinds of cable boxes throughout the space, but the one I am starting with is a four circuit box. I have started by 3D drafting one of our circuit boxes and adding on a couple of cylinders at the top of the box portion where the circuits will be labelled. In a perfect world, I would be able to set a custom field to this device like I would any lighting instrument and either a.) use a lighting label legend with some slight modifications to change my circuit numbers or b.) skip the lighting instrument hack altogether and have this device be its own thing that references a custom record for each circuit. Ideally, I want to be able to see what number each circuit is in my drafting and denote what pipe each box is hung on just like I would with a lighting instrument. This would make the plots much more readable.

 

I understand that there is something regarding records and linking things through records that makes this possible, but every time I try to follow those steps I get various errors ranging from "illegal object" to "not enough objects selected." I'm certain I'm just missing something basic. Any ideas?

[Jesse Cogswell]

This is fairly simple and crazy powerful.  I use record linked text in symbols all the time for labels, platform elevations, and title blocks.  The process is as follows:

 

First, build your record.  For this example, I've included four circuits with their fields set to "text."  I found that it's often times best to use "text" rather than "number" so that you can have circuits with a letter in them ("R" for relay, "W" for worklight, etc), and there's no huge advantage to having them as numbers, since you aren't going to be summing them in a worksheet anyway.  It's entirely optional to have something in the default value, I will often leave it blank if it's going to be an object that doesn't always have a label, but in this case, I think it will be helpful.  Four circuits are what I used in this example, but I would include the number of circuits for your largest box.

 

 

Next, you are going to need to build your symbol.  Include individual text blocks for each of the linked items.  Don't really worry about what's in them for now, just make sure that it's not blank.  This is a good opportunity to double check spacing.  Also, make sure the text is formatted as you want it.  Record linked text follows alignment, justification, and any kind of text wrapping that the source text box has.  This also works with both 2D and 3D text, so if using a hybrid symbol and you want the text to appear in 3D, make sure to have text boxes with their plane set to 3D.

 

Symbol 2D

 

Symbol 3D

 

Next, enter into the symbol edit and select one of the text boxes.  Then go to Tools-Records-Link Text to Record.  This will bring up a dialog allowing you to select the record and field to attach to the text.  Do this for each text box.  This can be really tedious if you have a lot of text boxes, so I recommend rebinding the menu command to something easy (I use Ctrl+R) using the Workspace Editor.

 

 

Once you're done, you can change the circuits by using the Data tab of the Object Info Palette.

 

 

Labeling things through the Data tab can be a little tedious as well.  You can create database worksheets that can make things a little more convenient, or you can use Spotlight Numbering to do it for you.

 

 

 

One major caveat of this is that you can't really have nested symbols with linked text, the linked text MUST be in the direct symbol.  What this means is that you can't take two 4-circuit box symbols and use them to create an 8-circuit box symbol and still have access to the record fields.  You can use Group, however, with the caveat that you will have to enter the group to edit the numbers unless you have a database worksheet.

Record Linked Text Example.vwx