AD17 increment PCB designators in a batch

[crypton]

Hei,

I am wondering If I could incerement existing PCB components' designators with x amount of numbers.
Lets say I have PCB component with designator R3xx, I want to increment it with 300, so it ends up R6xx. But so with components that are All selected.

Goal is to keep my PCB placement/routing (from older time) but assign different schematic designator numbering to those components (schematically nets are all the same, it just differs in numbers).
Once I can match the designators, then nets will assign automatically. at least that's the idea.

I've found Smart Edit under PCB Inspector for the 'Name' parameter. But I can't seem to find any commands that I can use there :/. (only two examples which say nothing what arguments mean).
Or any other way to achieve this without messing up my copied PCB layout ?

[T3sl4co1l]

Expressions there come from Pascal library functions,
http://www.templetons.com/brad/alice/language/language8.html
should be helpful.

Better would be to have everything named properly: add a root sheet to your project, and place two sheet symbols linking in the existing design.  Set a multichannel naming scheme under Project Options.  Once everything is in order, compile the project, go back to PCB and check Component Links.  Match up everything original in the first channel.  Import changes from schematic, and copy placement.

The bad way is to duplicate one schematic, in a flat project, annotate the copied sheet, copy-and-paste the PCB, and redo component links.  Bad because you have no guarantee the two channels will be synchronized, after editing.

Tim

[radar_macgyver]

If it's just a one-off, you could use Schematic List, select all the items in the list and Ctrl+C, then paste it into Excel. You can then use Excel formulas to manipulate the refdes, and paste it back into the Schematic List. I find this easier than messing with AD17's expressions.

[T3sl4co1l]

You can also use the substitution expression in Inspector, e.g.:
{R3=R6}
{C3=C6}
and so on for each prefix in the selection.  Maybe this supports a wildcard that can be alphanumeric?  Unsure.  (On a related note, did they add Regex to AD18?  That'd be handy.)

Tim