Autocad Electrical 2015, question about editing catalog data for new symbols

[rayj777]

Hello, everyone.

 

In the panel drawing I am currently working on, there are a group of objects that don't have appropriate catalog data per the manufacturer. For example, I need to insert a footprint for an Allen-Bradley LED light bar, which isn't in the AB/etc. catalogs (but does exist on their website). In order to insert this entry into the catalog, the prompts require the TYPE field. There is no way to cleanly determine what sort of data is required in the TYPE field for this item...the criteria seems to change from one product family to another. We also have a handful of products from manufacturers that don't provide ACADE catalog data.

 

I want the data I enter into the catalog to be square with catalog formattng and the manufacturer's data, and I also need to generate a clean BOM from the project. Does anybody have any suggestions as to what can be done here? At the moment, my only option seems to be building a unique catalog for the project in MISC_CAT and bluffing through the grey areas. Is this common practice?

[ReMark]

No replies? Let's give this thread a *bump* then. Maybe dbroada can supply an answer. Here goes........

 

*bump*

[Ski_Me]

Click on manage tab, on your ribbon you will see a selection for catalog editor click on it. From here you can edit the contents of you catalog. There a lot of steps here that you have to follow and I'm not sure what they all are. I tried to create content for fire alarm stuff a while back but never finished. But if you have access to manufacturer data then it should not to difficult. But still not an easy task.

[rayj777]

I'm no programmer, but just to describe my exploration of the process a bit:

 

After trying to glean what little info I could through the ACADE interface, I downloaded and installed the LibreOffice suite, which happens to be able to read MS Access database files...useful if you are trying to parse what the various fields are looking for, which differs across manufacturers.

 

The RATING and TYPE field content is parsed from rules decided upon by whoever is writing the manufacturer's catalog data. When generating a BOM, these are lines included under the 'description' field. Since my company is trying to produce a clean BOM from ACADE, we are currently writing entries into the MISC_CAT database for panel footprints. I expect this to blow up on us at some point (as updated 'official' manufacturer data is added to the catalogs), but this is a smaller project.

 

The catalog browser/editor fails in the sense that it limits searches to specific tables. This isn't much of an issue if you are working schematics, but when dealing with a pile of one-off miscellaneous items it can be a productive-time black hole (what table are cabinet 'data pockets' listed under?). Not to mention that it hogs the whole interface while open...