room names/numbers

Hi all! I have a question I hope somebody might be able to offer some insight on. You can tell I'm not an active poster here.. but use this site often for refernce, and can usually find what I'm looking for via a search, but I haven't been able to pinpoint this one yet.

I am at a mech/elec consult firm, and in our office, we recieve cad drawings from our clients (architects, usually) and from there, we create our own. We take the background drawing they give us, wblock out all of the pertinant objects, basically the structure of the building itself, leaving out all of their notes, section references, text in general actually, dimensions, etc. We create our own new drawing, insert that block, change layers to match our plot settings and each disipline in the office can then x-ref that drawing as the background. Then it gets updated as we recieve updates from the arch. Each discipline then creates their own x-ref's with their own devices. So there'd be one for power, one for lighting, hvac, plumbing, etc. Within each of these drawings is where we place the room names and numbers. They have to be able to be moved in each drawing as in one, they wouldn't want to interfere with a light fixture, where it may need to be in another location so as not to interfer with notes on a ductwork plan, or similar. We also retype the room names and numbers we recieve from the arch into our own blocks for uniformity mostly. So each room has a block with two attributes in it, name & number.

My question: is there a way to have one drawing, that contains nothing but the blocks of each room name and number, and have it x-ref'ed or inserted as some type of dynamic block, or something so that when the arch decides to re-number an entire wing of a drawing (for instance), we would be able to go into that one drawing, and make the appropriate changes? And the tricky part about this... is that that one drawing would have to be able to be in some way referenced to each of the disciplines drawings, and permit each individual room's block to be movable. Have I described this accurately and not in too confusing of a manner? I hope so, it's a hard concept for me to put into words I guess. At this point, I don't know if it's possible. I'm sure it is to some extent, but may not be worth the extra trouble that would coincide with it... Any help would be appreciated though!

Thanks

I thought I was following, right up until you said each room's block needs to be movable

so this isn't going to happen via xref then?

were you looking for a lisp to do it?

I guess that's why I say that I'm not sure how to translate this from my thought to verbage! I'm using the term 'x-ref' though, I don't think x-ref is really appropriate though. I don't know, maybe what I'm looking for doesn't exist.

Say for example these are my drawings for a particular job:

x-power

x-lighting

x-duct

x-plumb

x-data

x-background

x-titleblock

out of these, i would create a sheet E1 and reference x-background and x-lighting and x-titleblock. Sheet E2 and reference x-background, x-power, and x-titleblock... and so on with the rest. as it is now, room names and numbers exist as individual blocks in each of the disciplined drawings (there are blocks in each room in x-power, x-lighting, ....) so when the arch for instance changes a room name, we have to go into 5 drawings and make that change (this hypathetic case anyway).

I would like the ability to have x-roomname that has all room names and numbers in it. from this x-roomname, the blocks will appear in each of the 5 sheets, yet within each room, furthermore, in each discipline, I want to be able to move that one room name to make it fit asthetically per that discipline, but not have it move in any other drawings. So I can have room name at coords 0,0 and another at say 0,5, and another at 0,10. In the lighting plan, these all work, but in the power, I have to move the second from 0,5 to 2,3 (but if I did this in lighting it'd then be overlapping a light fixture).

But now if that room name changes at some point, I can just go into x-roomname and make the change accordingly, and it'll update in each lighting, power, ... and all the roomnames in each discipline's drawing will stay positioned where I had chosen them to be.

I'm thinking that perhaps the best approach to this would be to forget the x-roomname drawing aspect, and think more along the lines of a spreadsheet. Maybe have an Excell file that lists the room number and in the next column the room name. then in x-lighting, I could have some sort of block that grabs the data from Excell and fills it in the 'attribute' part of the block. In x-power I could copy that block and put it essentially anywhere I wanted, and these two blocks would have no impact on each other.. but if I were to go into the Excell file and make a change to a name, that name would be maybe an ole link or something similar? So each of the different drawings would grab the data from there.. or would this at some point become too monotonous in one aspect or another?

ha, I'm sorry if I'm doing a horrible job at explaining this. It seems that I have an idea of what I want, and I know just enough to start in a direction.. but once I get going in that direction, I quickly start to get lost.

I should also probably add that I'm now using AutoCAD 2006, and no longer 2002. (full version)

well your two posts give people quite a bit to go on, so fingers crossed somebody more knowledgeable than me spots this on monday morning

(liking the excel/attribute solution though)

PS - are those actually separate x-refed drawings or are they layers and sheets in the same drawing?

I will have them crossed! I have adult ADD so, getting through a good thorough explaination of something rather difficult can be a task for me! Luckily I have meds! But then sometimes my explainations are too in depth and redundant :wink:

To answer your question though.. they are all separate drawings. The reason for this being that very often, we have several people working on one job at the same time. Keeping each discipline in a separate xref allows that we can all be working at the same time without running into 'read-only' or 'access denied' problems.. especially when it comes down to crunch time, like after recieving a phone call saying the bid date has been moved from 2 weeks out, to say.. tomorrow!

I've thought about tackling this problem several times, but this task usually turns into busy work for an intern/co-op or something. I'm in the office tonight though making some changes for a job, and it's a rather large school project.. I just realized that the architect changed several room names within the latest architectural update we recieved and nobody's caught it up till this point. So I've just wasted a descent amount of time fixing each block in one drawing to reflect the appropriate updated names. Then (as our current standard has us doing) had to erase all room names/numbers from each of the other drawings, paste in all the correct ones.. and then go through each drawing, painstakingly moving each block (not all, but a lot) so that it wasn't interfering with devices in each of the other particular drawing. It's just very tedious because it's so easy to overlook one here-or-there, and then when the partner goes to review the drawings... they get fussy with the CAD ops because to them it seems like such a simple easy thing to do, and they can't understand how somebody could overlook something so obvious. You don't necessarily notice lines bleeding and running together until you plot though.. and from my standpoint, I rarely find myself working with hard copies of a project. Everything is on the computer. I thought about trying make the room name block so that it masked objects behind it.. but then too often, I could see critical info getting covered up!

Thanks for entertaining my request tonight though! And as I said, I'll keep my fingers crossed that somebody might have a workable solution!

Best wishes~

Can you not insert the room names as a block and then have a vba routine that will scan the block at the start of the drawing and make sure it ties up with a main version of the block saved in a shared location.

This does just sound like an X-ref. But, it should allow for the room names to be moveable in each drawing, yet everytime the drawing is loaded it will scan to check if the attributes/text are displaying their most recent definition.

Obviously when the scan does take place and redefines the attribut, you don't want it to reset the location of the text/attributes. I am pretty certain there is enough flexibility within VBA to achieve this.

There is LISP and other programming languages, too, dont forget.

I found something I thought would be useful.. and still may be a start, but it's missing some key things.. maybe somebody could improve on this idea?

I found the ATTOUT and ATTIN commands in AutoCAD. I was able to create one drawing with my names and numbers. When it was finished, run ATTOUT, and export all the block and attribute data into Excel. I could then at any time make any necessary changes to names or numbers in Excel, save, open the CAD drawing again, and run ATTIN, select the Excel file, and bring the ammended names and numbers back in. When using ATTOUT and ATTIN, along with the values given to the block's attributes, the block's 'handle' also gets stored. This way, I could move that block within CAD if necessary, and if I made any changes to the number for instance, when I ran ATTIN it would still fix the right block, and would not have any impact on it's possition.. since it's the handle that it's looking for! Perfect!!!... Except for one big thing.. I cannot implement this from one drawing to another. If I am to take a block from say my lighting plan, and copy it to the power plan, they are not likely going to have the same handle. The handle is assigned when the block is inserted, and relatively speaking has nothing to do with the block itself, other than giving it a unique identifier, a handle that no other block/object in the drawing has. So I think if there was a way that I could somehow keep the handles the same from one drawing to the next.. this would work. This almost seems impossible though.