Device Family Dialog

Lets you select from a list of device families to assign to a symbol if desired.

Accessed when:

You click the Browse button next to the Family field in the Device Properties dialog.

Certain symbols can have a parent or child relationship with other symbols in a schematic. Examples include relays and motor starters (parent) which have related contacts (child) appearing throughout a drawing. If child symbols are given the same device ID as the parent, the system can automatically provide cross referencing. The software can also alert you when you try to assign more child symbols than are available for the parent.

The system intelligence knows the number and type of children that a given parent symbol can have. This is accomplished with a Device Family definition that establishes the type and number of child symbols that are associated with the parent and which cross reference symbol to place next to the parent symbol.

When you place a parent or child symbol on a drawing, you can assign the symbol to a device family by selecting one in the Family field of the Device Properties dialog. You can enter the name of the family or select the browse button to display the Device Family dialog to select from a list of families.

Once the system knows the family name, it can also perform error-checking functions by keeping track of how many of the available child symbols have been used.

A number of device family definitions are provided with Bentley Substation . You also can create custom family definitions. The example above could use the standard family named 20. This device consists of a parent relay with two normally open and no normally closed contact children. Put simply, the device family definition contains the following information:

Setting	Description
Family Name	20
Parent Symbol Name	CR
Cross Reference Symbol Name	Q20
Child Symbol	CRNO
Child Symbol	CRNO

Over-Assignment of Family

If you attempt to assign more items to a family than it is configured to contain, the software will display an Engineering Design Consideration dialog to inform you.

You have three choices:

Click the Search button to choose a different family to replace the current family.
Append the current symbol to the device family. The appended symbol will use the same device ID as the existing items in the family.
Cancel the current symbol placement and use a different device ID.

Note: You can choose to turn off the Append option in the Project Options Drawings Standards page. If you do this, option number 2 and the Append button in the above dialog will be grayed-out.

Family on the Fly