Variables

What if you want to change the position of a component and that position is referenced from elsewhere in the sheet? You would have to go to each of those places and manually change the text to show the new position of the component. That's where variables come in.

A variable is referenced by %name or %{name}, where name is the name of the variable. So, in any object that displays text, any occurence of %name or %{name} is replaced with the value of the variable named name. The %{name} should be used when the variable contents should be immediately followed by non-whitespace characters. For example, if the variable %test has a value of sch, then the string %{test}im will be displayed as schim. Had the curly braces been omitted, then the value of the variable %testim would have been displayed.

Each occurrence of %name or %{name} will be substituted with the corresponding value. If a variable is undefined it is assumed to have an empty string as its value.

If you wish to display a % character, you should escape it with another %. I.e. %% is displayed as %.

There are a few built-in variables:

Name	Aliases	Description
designation	d dt	Standard component identifier
function	f	The function group of the component
location	l	The mounting location of the component
name	n	The component name
page	p pg	The current page
author	a	The author of the project
date	D	The export date
page_total	pt	The total number of sheets

The user can define any number of additional variables. Each variable has the following properties:

• Name - the name with which to reference it

• Aliases - a list of abbreviations separated by spaces

• Value - the value with which to replace each occurence of %name

• Description - useful for better organization, but can be omitted