Holt Design Tools: Increment Attribute Name
The Holt Design Tools are an add-on application for AutoCAD Electrical, and are available for subscription purchase on the Autodesk App Store. There are currently 15 tools in the toolkit, with plans to add more tools in the future. The Increment Attribute Name tool is a part of the Symbol Building family of tools. Check out all of the great features in the Holt Design Toolkit here. Description The Increment Attribute Name tool incrementally changes the suffixes of an alphanumeric series of attributes (e.g., TERM01, TERM02, TERM03, etc.). The user is prompted to insert the beginning value, and then given the option to increment or decrement with each click, or select a group of attributes to update. The tool allows the user to update a single or group of attributes with the same suffix (e.g., TERM01, TERMDESC01, X1TERM01) to the selected suffix. When building larger symbols, such as wiring diagram relay symbols with dozens of pin connections, IAN will greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to add all the appropriate terminal, wire connection, and wire annotation attributes. Use this tool when creating large, custom symbols like SEL rear-view panel symbols. In symbols of this nature, there is typically a long series of incremented attributes that the user creates by copying one attribute (or group of attributes) at a time. Copying the attributes does not increment their names, however, so the user ends up with dozens of attributes with the same name. Rather than double-clicking on each attribute to edit the name in a dialogue box, the IAN tool automatically edits the attribute name with a single click. Directions The user will be directed to input a new suffix value as the first value of the incrementation process. The new suffix should be two (2) characters only, and all numbers below 10 should have a leading zero. For example, to change TERM01 to TERM02, the suffix should be “02.” AutoCAD Electrical will not allow a three-digit attribute suffix, meaning that there cannot be an attribute named TERM100 following TERM99. Instead, the next attribute after TERM99 is TERMA0. The IAN tool will automatically increment from 99 to A0, and then from A9 to B0, and so on. (Suffixes beginning with the letters “I” and “O” are automatically skipped because of how closely these letters resemble the numbers one and zero in some fonts.) After inputting the new suffix, the user…