Change Visability state of some blocks

[lesleys]

Hi All
I have a dynamic symbol that reperesents our smoke detectors which has multiple visability states. No problems with the block but I now have a set of drawings where I need to change some blocks visability.
For example 100 detectors
10 at vis A
20 at vis B
70 at vis C

Is there a quick way to say change the 20 at Vis B to Vis A without having to go to each one?

Looked at Quick select but there is no option for visability state which would have been ideal. I also looked at trying to use the find & replace as it has an attribute but though it found them all & I had hoped I could use that.

I'm sure it could be done using lisp but unfortunatly its not something I have ever got to grips with. Any ideas or one for the wish list?
Thanks for any help/ideas

[clshade]

I do believe that you are stuck with OOTB CAD.
There is an Anonymous Name assigned to the different Vis State block that are otherwise equal and there are Lisp to do this but I too am a neophyte in that regard.

[lesleys]

hi Charles
Thanks for your reply, you confirmed what I thought.
Seeing how long Dynamic blocks have been around I would have thought that Autodesk would have added a few more everyday functions to them by now.

1: To be able to select the visability state via quick select.
2: Once you had made that choice then you could via the properties box change from say vis 1 to vis 2 or any other prop you wanted to change say move only those blocks to another layer.

Like a lot of things I guess that is to much to hope for!

[FabriCADed]

Is there a quick way to say change the 20 at Vis B to Vis A without having to go to each one?

Are they on separate layers already? You can use Quick Select to grab the blocks and then change visibility within the properties all at once to save you the time of going through individually.

[lesleys]

Are they on separate layers already? You can use Quick Select to grab the blocks and then change visibility within the properties all at once to save you the time of going through individually.

Hi thanks for your reply.

No they are on one layer. What the block is is a smoke detector with 14 "types" each of which is a visabilty state. What happens is that the customer can often say no I don't want a heat detector a heat/sounder instead & the dynamic block makes this easy to do with just a click. I then use the data extraction so the engineers get a list of parts etc.

Not a big issue but rather than hunt around a floor layout changing each one as you find it, it would be good if it was an option on quick select.

[FabriCADed]

Sounds like a wish list item to me... You may be able to find a lisp somewhere that would accomplish that, but if they are all on the same layer and are the same block, I can't think of any other way of doing it...

[USMCBody]

I'm guesssing you already know this, but you can just manually click / window select the blocks you want while holding shift to make them all current and then go to the properties and mass change them all at once to what ever you need.

I also don't know of a way to 'automatically filter' through the entire drawing and only select one's based off of a parameter you created...

[feargt]

I had a similar issue where I had 5 visibility parameters that represeneted phases. and every two weeks or so about a 1000 blocks had to be updated to show the updated phases.
The blocks are inserted the first time with a reference number. This was exported to excel with attout. The attribute was filled in here based on info from another excel file.
Then using attin the attributes were updated in autocad. Then I ran a lisp file over it that changed the visibility parameter to correspond with the attribute value.

Perhaps it is a workflow to consider for the future. Let me know if you need more info.