Topic: your thoughts on fields

[ELOQUINTET]

i was thinking of implementing date fields into our titleblock and was wondering if and how someone else may have done it. i'll explain the situation first. we have 2 issue dates which should be updated automatically when the final prints are sent out. they often come back for revision so how would you create a field for revisions. i was thinking of current date but if you gave that to revision 1 if you also attached that to revision 2 the date for revision 1 would change as well. i was thinking maybe you could have a plot button which would sort of lock certain fields and prevent them from updating. any ideas or suggestions?

[PDJ]

I would think the only way you could do it would be to explode the field after rev 1 is sent out..   Maybe there's something you can do with an attribute block and assign a field to it.  Hmmm..   In my dimented little world, we don't track revisions but, I DO have my dates as a field so when it's plotted I can see what date the drawing was plotted on.   Much better than the old plot stamps, that's for sure..

[MP]

When I looked at fields (beta of 2005) I was not impressed with the way that I had to create them programmatically (was not direct). This may have no bearing at all on your decision; moreover, they may have changed things substantially since then. The highest version I have to play with currently is 2004, so I'm at a loss to comment on the current state beyond what I did.

1½¢

[ELOQUINTET]

yeah the explode idea is a good one but i was just thinking what would be the best method of determining what field to explode and the best point to determine this?

[SPDCad]

You could use the comments property of the file and have the feild in your title block read it.

example.
comments would read - Additional elevator added to building - 5Mar05
then have the feild read the property.


I currently use the feilds to name our drawings based on the filename.
ie.
03003_A100.dwg, where A100 is is extracted from the file name with desiel text and placed in the title block.

This allows us to rename sheets without opening them up.  I have use the desiel trick of renaming the files since autocad 2000. It works great. We also have the detail bubble on the title block read the filename and extrack the dwg number, so that when we rename the file all references on the sheet to the sheet name change also. Its definetly a time saver.
I have also looked into using feilds more in our title block and I see lots of potential.

[ELOQUINTET]

yeah i looked at it a long time ago when 2005 came out but my old job used 2002 so i kinda dropped it but now i'm being asked to explore this along with sheet sets. that's interesting about comments but where do you put the comments. i'm trying to have something automatic. we now have buttons which insert diesel for each revision but if you forget to click the button   . i saw somebody the other day opening a crap load of files and updating the dates and thought there has gotta be a better way.

[ELOQUINTET]

AHA i think i may have found something. it's not automatic but close enough. i went here

http://www.wport.com/%7Enemi/

and downloaded Leo's routine for creating custom fields. basically it creates custom properties in drawing properties that you can fill in when you plot whatever revision you are sending out. what i am trying to figure out now is how do you make a field non plotting until it has a value. i thought i could put ---- but it plots?

[ronjonp]

i saw somebody the other day opening a crap load of files and updating the dates and thought there has gotta be a better way.

If you xref your titleblock you only have to make this change once

[ELOQUINTET]

well i'm no expert yet on the way things are setup here but all of our titleblock info insert from access which i'd never encountered before and the file name info is embedded within this block. i don't really understand the relationship yet. i guess that's why they hired me, to straighten out this mess. thanks