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Fields, Attributes, Dynamic Blocks, MText, and Excedrin


MaxwellEdison

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As we're currently between projects, my department has a bit of downtime until the new year. I'm using this time to organize and improve our block library of details by incorporating them into dynamic blocks. For the most part I've removed what text elements I could, but I'm still running into a situation where I think I need more out of fields and attributes than they are willing to give me.

 

The attached sample block should illustrate what I am trying to do fairly well. Basically I want to put distance information from a couple of parameters into a field and then use that in an MText or Multiline Attribute. I seem to be getting that part of it to work, the problem is coming when I try to push everything inside the dynamic block and insert it into another drawing. Basically Here's what I'm looking for out of the dynamic blocks.

  • To be able to copy/paste the block from drawing to drawing
  • To be able to insert the block from its own discrete file
  • To be able to change the dynamic block parameters after the above situations and have the text reflect the changes (ATTSYNC, REGEN, etc...)

The simpler I can make this process the better, as its not just for me but our department. And as such, not everyone is as comfortable with attribute properties and the like. Also for similar reasons I cannot use LISPs or VBA.

 

The more I think about it...the worse that pain at my temple gets...

PLEASEWORK.dwg

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***Shameless self-bump***

 

Okay, I've lowered my sights somewhat. I've replaced most of the comments I wanted to update dynamically with dimensions, however I still have a multi-leader I would like the user to be able to change from the properties palette. My plan was to define the attribute, then place a field in the body of the mleader to call on that attribute. Only to find that I couldn't locate any attributes in the Field Options. Does anyone know how I can accomplish this? I want to keep the note as a multileader because the block this is for has various different parameters and stretches applied to it and the multi leaders keep their formatting very nicely. I've attached a very simple example file below again. If anyone can post an example of how they'd handle it I'd really appreciate it.

Example.dwg

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  • 1 month later...

I believe I have it working the way you wanted it to work.

 

What I found was that if you insert a field that points to a regular object into an attribute, the attribute must be set as constant for it to work. And, if you insert a field that points to a parameter, such as a linear distance parameter, it will not work if the attribute is set to constant.

 

As I understood it, you didn't want any editable attributes in the block, which means they all need to be constant, which meant that I couldn't reference the linear parameter to get the height. So, what I did was I set up a line that stretches with the height of the circle from the baseline to use as a measuring stick. Then I set up two visibility states, with the default having the stick invisible, and set it to 0 grips. Luckily, it still seems to be able to read the stick while it is invisible.

 

One other problem I ran into, is that it seemed to skew the mtext box of the paragraph when dragging it, so I set up a basepoint and move action at the insertion point to keep this from happening.

 

As far as I can tell, everything seems to work as you wanted it to.

PLEASEWORK_REWORKED.dwg

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