Continue to Site

Welcome to MCAD Central

Join our MCAD Central community forums, the largest resource for MCAD (Mechanical Computer-Aided Design) professionals, including files, forums, jobs, articles, calendar, and more.

instance name in note

DrWily55

New member
Can anyone tell me how to put the name of an instance of a family table in a note? You can do this with parameter names by the following.


parameter name is let's say "depth" so you would create a note and where you want this value you would put &depth


So you would "think" to do the same for an instance name you would use this:


&instance_name:session id or &instance_name:cid_XX or something like that. Just can get it to work.


Any help would be much appreciated.


DrWily55
 
I agree, but that doesn't work either.


Let me explain a little more. Now that I think about it, there are other factors involved. I also didn't explain it very well to begin with. My fault for that. I was just thinking about grabbing the name/parameter value. It's not quite that simple.


The assembly has many components. The name I want to grab for the note is actually a part with instances of itself in it's own family table, not the name of the instance itself.


In the main assembly the component is added to the table and a "Y" or "N" value tells the assembly rather to include the part or not. In this case the part is always set to yes. In the main assembly table, the header of the column reads as follows:


M43 on the upper line and the name of the part on the second line. M43 represents the component id and the part name is the correct name of the part.


In the generic line (the top line that you can't change) of the family table you see a "Y" for yes to include this part.


The intances of the generic can be set to whatever instance of that part you want. You can copy and paste or type inthe instance name of the part into that cell, or select "tool", "replace using", "interchange assembly". If you do this it will open another box and you can select the instance of that part you want to use.


Also, the part itself can be changed with a completely different part via interchange assembly. The component id does stay the same when parts, and instances of those parts, are changed. In other words the M43 number never changes.


So I would agree, you would think session id or component id would work with the syntax given above. Apparently, this is a different animal.


Again, thanks for any help and I apolgize for the first attempt to explain the problem.





__________
 
There is a work-around for showing part parameters in an assembly drawing that will get around this type of failure.



In the assembly create parameters that match the type of the part parameters you want to show on the drawing.



Create relations in the assembly to define these parameters along the lines of



des1 = description:7

pn1 = part_number:7

mat1 = material:7



des2 = description:11


pn2 = part_number:11

mat2 = material:11



One set of equations is required in the assembly for every part you want to label on the drawing.



On the drawing create your notes with &des1 e.t.c.



You should now be able to swap instances in the assembly family table with the notes being replaced by three asterisks.



A word of warning though, avoid using the same part more than once
(except in patterns) in the assembly UNLESS you want to replace them
ALL at the same time because the sessionid may not be specific enough.
Instead of using the same model three times in the generic of the
assembly you could perhaps use the generic part once and two different
instances even if you have to create pseudo-generics to do so.





Dell Boy











Edited by: Dell_Boy
 

Sponsor

Articles From 3DCAD World

Back
Top