Remote control of field with external text.

[NerdlingOne]

Hi AUGI-ites,
I did a search for this but didn't quite get what I was looking for. Hope someone can shed some light or at least can say yeah or nay.

I'm basically looking for an easy way to control a field in a block with a piece of external text. Below is an attached picture of a block that represents a drawing stamp.

I would like users to be able to somehow manipulate the text inside from some common file that they could access outside the drawing and change it to whatever they would like. For example, during the early part of the project, they would put "PRELIMINARY". Then when they went to construction, they could update all blocks to say "ISSUED FOR CONSTRUCTION" and have the date. You get the idea.

1) Can I get away with this without a Sheet Set. I'm trying to make this as easy as possible. We are a consulting engineer firm with wildly different client standards and I don't think it would be practical just to accomodate one block.

2) I know RTEXT can do this but it can't be justified.

Basically can I have my RTEXT cake and eat it too?
Possible with 2009 but not in 2007 maybe?
Thanks in advance.

[cadtag]

Use sheetsets to manage your drawing sets, and define the value you want as the "Project Phase" property on the sheet set. Your field can then just pull that from SSM.

[RobertB]

So why not just place text in the titleblock's XRef? You do use XRefs for each project's titleblock, don't you?

[cadtag]

Not anymore. SSM and Fields work much better for us than the Xref Titleblock.

the only flaw, and it's a big one, is attempting to use multiple lines with Fields. Until Autodesk provides a way to force a new line via fields, then we're still going to be manually editing the sheet titles. I have to be able to control where the line break happens, and not just let the text flow into an Mtext attribute.

[RobertB]

I too use SSM, but cannot dream of not having the titleblock as an XRef even with SSM (the non-unique objects that is). How in the world do you handle an update to the titleblock in the project? ("Oops, the architect forgot a line, now it needs to be added.")

[joshua.jones]

the only flaw, and it's a big one, is attempting to use multiple lines with Fields. Until Autodesk provides a way to force a new line via fields, then we're still going to be manually editing the sheet titles. I have to be able to control where the line break happens, and not just let the text flow into an Mtext attribute.

You can use a FIELD inside MTEXT so that it wraps naturally.

Or, if you need to control the lines exactly, you can define a seperate FIELD for each line and name them something like, "SHEET TITLE - Line 1", "SHEET TITLE - Line 2", "SHEET TITLE - Line 3", etc.

We use both fields-in-MTEXT and individual fields in our title blocks.

[Tom Beauford]

Add a custom property named Status and change the value as the status changes.

When inserting the field select Document as the category and Status as the name.

Using the Express Tool 'Update Drawing Property Data' you can automate the process as well.

For small projects I prefer to keep all layouts in a single file and this makes it easy.

[ron.brees]

See my Tutorial http://management.cadalyst.com/cadman/Tips+%26+Tools+Weekly+Newsletter+Archives/Tips-amp-Tools-Weekly-Vol-13-No-35/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/552138?contextCategoryId=34359 That explains how to accomplish it through SSM.

[NerdlingOne]

Thanks for the replies all. I forgot about this thread because I wasn't getting email notifications and thought it was abandoned.