Manual/Automatic Mixed Wire Numbering

Hi,

I recently have started using SWE (2020 SP1), to create wire harnesses for automotive/heavy equipment. I am having issues with automatic wire numbering. My companies internal processes require us to make and manufacture harnesses (in-house) for customized vehicles, the only issue is that we print wire numbers onto harness wires with a wire printer. This is great for service, but a bit of a nightmare in SWE because we have several pass-through connectors, buses, splices which have the same equipotential number only incremented with a double letter wire marking (i.e. 352, 352A, 352B,...,352AA,352AB,...,352ZZ). This is a service requirement that the equipotential number stay the same throughout a single circuit.

The only way I have been able to get passthrough for achieving equipotential pass-through is using dynamic connectors (with pin/terminal symbols setup for passing circuit information), and by having each circuit in the manufacture reference part have two terminals. This mostly works as shown in the figure below when the wire cable ordering is fairly simple (see Figure 1), but it starts to break apart when I switch some of the wire numbers to manual so that they don't change during automatic wire generation (see Figure 2).

Figure 0: Test Schematic

Figure 1: Only Automatic Wiring Numbering

Figure 2: Changed Equipotential of Wire 352 to 398 using manual equipotential & wire mark, and renumbered all other wires using by recalculating wire marks. 

My Equipotential Numbering formula is as follows:

STRZ(VAL(EQUIPOTENTIAL_ORDERNO), 3, 0)

My Wire Numbering formula is as follows:

EQUIPOTENTIAL_ORDERNO +
IIF( VAL( WIRE_POSNO_EQUIP ) == 1 ,
'' ,
IIF( (VAL(WIRE_POSNO_EQUIP) < 28) & (VAL(WIRE_POSNO_EQUIP)>1) ,
CHAR( 65 + VAL( WIRE_POSNO_EQUIP) - 2 ),
CONCAT( CHAR( 64 + TRUNCATE( ( VAL(WIRE_POSNO_EQUIP -2 ) ) / 26 , 0 ) ) , CHAR(64 + ( VAL(WIRE_POSNO_EQUIP) - 1 ) - (26 * TRUNCATE( ( VAL(WIRE_POSNO_EQUIP ) - 2 ) / 26, 0 ) ) ) )
)
);

I keep running into getting negative wire numbers which really doesn't make sense because that means that the equipotential numbering is going negative. Another interesting observation is that when I change the wire equipotential to a manual number (398) SWE doesn't reset the automatic wire numbering count (300) according to the wire numbering formula above for the associated wire mark.

Figure 3: Equipotential properties for wire from TEST001:1 to SPLICE 6 TEST:1 (wire mark -1 in Figure 02)

Figure 4: Wire mark properties for wire from TEST001:1 to SPLICE 6 TEST:1 (wire mark -1 in Figure 02)

Could someone shed some more light on why this may be happening and how to use manual numbering in projects. I am trying to dive deeper on the SQL side but it feels like I am going further down into the rabbit hole (apparently manual wire numbers and automatic wire numbers are treated differently in the database).

Cheers,

Raazi

SolidworksElectrical