Your suggestion is a good one and is definitely on the list of attributes needed. The larger issue is controlling the properties of two instances of the same block separately.
I'm looking for solution that will allow me to insert a the same symbol multiple times, and re-name each instance with an increment of 1. So as I insert the same block 4 times, I get block-1.dwg, block-2.dwg, block-3.dwg and block-4.dwg. Now I can manage color properties of each instance of the same symbol as needed.
We use color to indicate what project an entity in a drawing is part of. Our drawings are living documents that may have 5 projects active going at the same time. Each project has a designated color. If I insert a new widget, it becomes red to indicate it's part of the most current project. In the same drawing next week, I insert another new widget (the same widget as last week) but for another project. It now becomes red and the 1st one gets changed to color 56. So on and so forth up to 5 colors for 5 different projects.
So I've built routines that hunt all red objects to change them to color 56. I have 10 routines for 5 colors, one to move entities to the next project color and 1 to change to bylayer if needed.
All of this works, and well enough. All of our symbols are simple lines and text. We don't mine any data though. We manually fill out an .mdb BOM and then fill out a second BOM in another program. I'm pushing to start using attributed blocks but I have to address the color control issue as part of the solution.
Hope that helps explain it a lil better
J. Logan
ACAD2015