Questions about moving circuits and parts anotattion

Schematic
1

First of all, I am using Kicad 6.0.5-a6ca702e91~116~ubuntu22.04.1

So, I am re-organizing a project using hierarchical pages. And then I am moving (by Ctrl-x and Ctrl-v) circuits on different pages (but this also happens if pasting on the same page)

When I do that, the component references are lost and markup references on labels turn to an ID.

  1. Is there a way that I can preserve the current annotation when moving the circuit to another page? If not, is there another way of moving the circuits without losing the annotations?

An idea that occurred to me right now while I was writing this post is to reimport references from the layout as a workaround. But I have to check if there is a way to do that and if this works.

  1. Since the reference of the component I am moving is lost, the reference of the markup annotation is missing and then the reference is replaced by an ID, which is right. However, when I re-annotate the references, this ID is not getting updated back to the reference I was using. Maybe the ID used on the markup in the label and the ID of the pasted Part are not the same anymore. Is this a bug?

For instance, I have a resistor R1, and a label with ${R1:REFERENCE}.
When moving (by cutting-pasting) this pair to a new place, the resistor becomes ?? and the label becomes something like ${0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000}. However, re-annotate the resistor does not update the label anymore.

2

1.) Is there a way that I can preserve the current annotation when moving the circuit to another page? If not, is there another way of moving the circuits without losing the annotations?

Right-click (RMB) -->context menu → paste special–>keep existing reference designators

attention: as these copies are new symbols, they get also new (internal) UUID-numbers.
If you want to keep the placement (on an already finished pcb) you have to run the “update pcb from schematic”-command one time with the checkbox “Relink footprints from schematic symbols based on reference designator”.
After that be sure to uncheck these checkbox for future use.

4 Likes
3

Cool, paste special is what I am looking for. Thanks.

Now, considering question #2. Any chance that we have a way to preserve the ID to keep labels working?

4

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