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#74728 by joshhuggins
Tue Sep 11, 2018 12:05 pm
There isn't a way to link the same symbol attribute between multiple symbols is there?
#74732 by joshhuggins
Tue Sep 11, 2018 12:38 pm
Neil Blanchard wrote:If you make a symbol of the text attribute(s) you want to share, then you can nest it in other symbols.
I forgot about this which it is handy, but that's not exactly what I was shooting for. I was wanting to have an attribute in one symbol that when it's value is changed, the value would change in another top level symbol would change as well. Thanks for the idea Neil, your suggestion is something I should take more advantage of. With all the new symbol layer tools a I am recreating a lot of symbols to work smarter and trying to get the most out of things while I am in the process of redefining things.
#74737 by Neil Blanchard
Tue Sep 11, 2018 3:55 pm
I think what you are asking - is to have a "master" attribute that is linked to all the other instances.

By nesting things, you could get that - by having a different symbol for each value. It wouldn't be an attribute (my mistake), though - just a text entity, that you edit in a drawing, and all the instances change when you edit one of them.
#74739 by Roger D
Tue Sep 11, 2018 4:13 pm
You could look into using a Lookup field and Field filled by Lookup, using a database. Then by editting the database for that project, one could change the attributes in the many symbols link to that database.
#74740 by joshhuggins
Tue Sep 11, 2018 6:11 pm
Roger D wrote:You could look into using a Lookup field and Field filled by Lookup, using a database. Then by editting the database for that project, one could change the attributes in the many symbols link to that database.
That's kind of where I think I am going to end up so multiple drawings of the same project can read from the same database. Think I am going to create a default database file at the root of our file server, create the symbols, insert them into our default drawings then rename the default database to orphan it so the first time someone tries to edit the symbols attributes they will be prompted to repath the database. I can then add to and modify the template as needed without affecting existing drawings as we go forward. This should work good. Hmm now to see if I can target a specific symbol to perform a edit attributes on from a macro. Then i could build a corresponding master symbol to quickly edit any field in the database directly from Datacad without having to fumble with Excel.

Neil Blanchard wrote:By nesting things, you could get that - by having a different symbol for each value. It wouldn't be an attribute (my mistake), though - just a text entity, that you edit in a drawing, and all the instances change when you edit one of them.
Yeah that's another way to do it, but would have to dig into the symbol editor each time to edit it or locate the root symbol in the symbol browser.

Thanks guys!

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