When working on Electrical schamtic drawings, a very important aspect is knowing where your wire are coming from and going to. An electrical schematic project can consist of many drawings and many changes can be made throughout the time spent creating these. When creating this drawing in vanilla AutoCAD, you would have to manually specify the source and destination of a wire, whether it was on the same page or jumping to a different page.

AutoCAD Electrical automates this process by managing all your wires in the database that it runs on. Out the box it is SQL Lite but you can setup your projects to run off SQL Express or the full SQL instance. Some setup is required for this to manage the users and who has certain rights like modifying the project settings or having read only rights to the project settings.

AutoCAD Electrical has a Source Arrow and a Destination Arrow command which can be used to tell the user where a wire is coming from and where a wire is going to.

When activating the Source Arrow command, the Signal – Source Code dialog box is presented and you have the option to enter a Code and Description. The code is a user input and will assist in identifying a partner for the Destination Arrow when you create that, if not inserted immediately after creating the Source Arrow. The Description is a description of the source signal. Once again the more information that you insert the easier it is to identify what is going on in the design. Selecting Defaults will open a dialog box with standard descriptions that have been created in the WDSRCDST.WDD file.

You have options to check whether a signal code has been used already. By selecting Drawing, AutoCAD Electrical will display a selection of codes used in the active drawing and by selecting Project, AutoCAD Electrical will display a list of codes used within the active project.

Selecting Search will follow the wire network and look for a destination arrow. Once found it will display the signal code in the code box. Pick closes the dialog box so that you can pick an existing wire network. If a destinatin arrow is found, then its signal code will be displayed in the code box. There are various Signal source arrow styles to choose from as well.

Once you have created the signal source, AutoCAD Electrical prompts you to insert a matching Destination Arrow.

If you select OK, you will be prompted to select the wire on which you want to place the Destination arrow. If the wire is another page, you will need to cancel the command, open the drawing that has the destination wire on and activate the Destination Arrow command.

On the Insert Destination Code dialog box you can insert a Code as well as Description but ideally you would want to select a Code and Description that is related to a Source Code and Description that already exists. Here you have the option of choosing a recent inserted code, a code that exists in the active drawing as well as a code that exists in another drawing in the current project.

In the recent dialog box, you have the option to show all. This will show all the Source and Destination arrow codes in the entire project. It will also include the sheet number that it exists on as well as the reference. The reference could either be grid or X column. Once you have selected the source that will provide the code for your detination arrow, slect OK and that source code and description will be filled in.

Once the command has run through the project and updated any information that is required you might see the above. Lots of question marks. This is an indication that you have not run your wire numbering command. Once that has been run, the questions marks will display the wire number above the description and the sheet refernce number next to the arrowhead symbol.

If you need to modify either the Code or Description, select the Source or Destination arrow, right click and select edit component.

If you select a Source arrow, you will have the option to erase the selected arrow. If you select a Destination arrow, you will have the option to erase the selected arrow.

When editing the source arrow, you will be prompted with the Update realted arrows dialog box. You have the option either to go ahead or skip the update. By skipping the update, it will be flagged as a task to run later.

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