Table of Contents

Wire & cable catalogue

The shield
Green-yellow conductors

CSV import and export
Limitations
See also

Status: pending. Everything on this page describes PR #936, not yet merged. Nothing here works until that lands — check the PR before trying any of this against your own build. This page will drop this notice once it does.

Wire & cable catalogue

A catalogue of cable and wire types — part numbers, cross-sections, core counts, core colours, shields, voltage and temperature ratings — that you build once and then draw from when setting up conductors.

The point is data entry, not drawing. Without it, a conductor carrying core 3 of a four-core CAN cable is set up by hand: pick the colour, type the section, type a label, and do it again for every conductor of that cable on every folio, getting it consistent by memory. With a catalogue entry, you pick the cable, pick the core, and the colour, section and label are filled in from the record.

Despite "wire" in the name, the data model is a cable model. A single-core wire is the degenerate case of one core:

bool isCable() const { return numCores > 1; }

Everything else — per-core colours, per-core sections, outer diameter, shield type, cable family — exists because a cable has several cores that differ.

What this is not

Read this before building a workflow on it.

QElectroTech still has no cable object. This catalogue does not create one. Assigning a catalogue entry to a conductor copies values onto that conductor; it does not group conductors into a cable, count cores against the record, or report on cables.

You might expect	What actually happens
Assigning a cable creates a cable that owns its conductors	Nothing is created. Each conductor is set up individually.
The Cable field ties conductors together	It records the cable id as free text. Nothing reads it — see Conductors → A note on cables.
The terminal strip shows cable and core columns	The terminal strip has `Cable` and `CableWire` columns declared, but nothing supplies them with a value. See discussion #934.
Core counts are checked	Nothing verifies that you used four conductors for a four-core cable.

So the catalogue makes conductor set-up consistent and fast. It is not cable management, and the fields it fills are the ordinary conductor fields that were always there.

Opening the panel

Display → Catalogue de fils et câbles.

The panel is a dock on the right-hand side, and it is hidden by default — the menu entry toggles it. It can be moved to the left dock area or floated.

Where the catalogue is stored

One SQLite file, in your user application-data directory:

<AppDataLocation>/wirecatalogue.sqlite

Two consequences worth knowing up front:

The catalogue is global, not per project. Every project on that machine sees the same catalogue. It is not carried inside the .qet file, so a project opened on another machine will not find the entries it was built from — only the values already copied onto its conductors.
It is not in your project backup. Back it up separately, or keep the master copy as a CSV (below) under version control.

What an entry records

Group	Fields
Identity	`wireId` (the key, e.g. `W31`), manufacturer name and part number, supplier name and part number, family (e.g. `CAN_Cable`)
Physical	nominal cross-section mm², outer diameter mm, insulation diameter mm, number of cores
Per core	colours (base plus up to two tracers), cross-section mm² — `0` means "use the nominal section"
Screening	has shield, shield type (`Braid`, `Foil`, `Both`)
Ratings	voltage V, temperature °C, flexible yes/no
Other	primary colour, free-text notes

Per-core sections are what let one record describe a mixed cable — a power core at 4 mm² alongside signal cores at 0.5 mm².

Core colours: IEC 60757

Colours are held as IEC 60757 names, not RGB. Each has a two-letter code, and a core may carry a base colour plus up to two tracer stripes.

Name	Code	Name	Code
Black	`BK`	White	`WH`
Brown	`BN`	Pink	`PK`
Red	`RD`	Turquoise	`TQ`
Orange	`OG`	Gold	`GD`
Yellow	`YE`	Silver	`SR`
Green	`GN`	Violet	`VT`
Blue	`BU`	Grey	`GY`
Green-Yellow	`GNYE`

Green-Yellow is a pair, not a colour, and it is handled specially — see below. Storing it as one RGB value is what previously made a protective conductor indistinguishable from a plain green one.

Searching

The search box matches a single term against, in one query:

wire id
manufacturer name and part number
supplier name and part number
primary colour
cross-section, matched as text
number of cores, matched as text

The last two matter. Typing 2.5 finds every 2.5 mm² entry, and 4 finds four-core cables, regardless of what the entries are called. Matching is a substring match, so 2.5 also matches 12.5.

Assigning a core to a conductor

This is the part you will use most.

Open a conductor's properties (double-click the conductor).
Go to the Affecter un fil tab.
Filter or search for the cable, and select it.
For a multi-core or shielded entry, choose which core from the core selector. Single-core, unshielded entries do not need this.
Press Affecter à ce conducteur.

What that writes to the conductor:

Conductor field	Value
Colour	that core's IEC 60757 colour
Section	that core's section, falling back to the entry's nominal section
Label	a generated string combining core reference, section and colour
Cable	the entry's `wireId` — stored, and read by nothing

Each conductor therefore represents one core. A four-core cable running between two cabinets is four conductors, each assigned a different core of the same entry.

The shield

For a shielded entry the core selector carries an extra Shield entry, so the screen can be drawn and terminated like any other core. Choosing it gives the conductor a dashed line style and the green-yellow pair.

Green-yellow conductors

Assigning a green-yellow core does not approximate the pair with one colour. It switches the conductor to QElectroTech's existing bicolour mode:

colour 1 — green, #00a651
colour 2 — yellow, #ffd700

So a protective conductor is drawn as a protective conductor, using the same bicolour support any conductor has always had.

CSV import and export

The panel exports the catalogue to CSV and imports it back. The default export name is wirecatalogue.csv.

Fields are quoted where needed, and a quoted field may contain line breaks — a multi-line note survives a round trip.

This is the practical way to:

move a catalogue between machines, since the database is per-user and global
keep the master list in version control and treat the local database as a cache
build the catalogue in a spreadsheet and load it in one go

Limitations

Stated as fact, not apology:

The catalogue is global per user, not per project, and is not stored in the .qet file.
The Cable field it fills is read by nothing today.
Nothing checks that the conductors you assign match the record's core count.
Core assignment is per conductor; there is no "apply this cable to these six conductors" action.
The catalogue database is opened when the dock is constructed, not on first use.
The interface is French, in line with the rest of QElectroTech's source language.