Conductors (wires)
A conductor is the line joining two element terminals. It is the object you place most and configure least, and its properties dialog carries about twenty fields — several of which exist only to fill a column in an export, and two of which currently do nothing at all.
This page is the reference for those fields: what each one does, where it is stored, and which export reads it. For a walkthrough of drawing wires, see User manual → Drawing Wires & Conductors.
1. Two kinds of conductor
Every conductor is one of two types, and the choice changes which half of the properties dialog applies.
| Type | Shows | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-wire (default) | a line with a text label | ordinary multi-line schematics, one conductor per wire |
| Single-line | a line with symbols — phase ticks, earth, neutral — and no text | single-line (one-line) diagrams, where one line stands for a whole circuit |
Switching type does not lose the other type's settings: both are stored, and only the relevant half is drawn.
2. Where a conductor's settings come from
There are three levels, and they are separate places in the interface. A new conductor takes the folio default; changing that default does not rewrite conductors already drawn.
| Level | Where | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Application default | Preferences → New project | conductors in projects you create from now on |
| Folio default | the folio's properties dialog | conductors drawn on that folio from now on |
| One conductor | double-click the conductor | that conductor only |
To change many existing conductors at once, select them and use Search & Replace, which edits conductor properties in bulk.
3. The properties, field by field
Stored in the .qet file on each <conductor> element, under the attribute
named in the last column.
Identification and documentation
| Field | What it is | XML attribute |
|---|---|---|
| Text / number | the wire number shown on the diagram | num |
| Formula | the expression the number is derived from, for auto-numbering | formula |
| Function | free text: what the wire is for | function |
| Tension / protocol | free text: voltage or bus protocol, e.g. 24VDC, Profibus |
tension_protocol |
| Wire colour | free text naming the physical wire colour, e.g. BN, bleu — not the colour it is drawn in |
conductor_color |
| Wire section | free text: cross-section, e.g. 1.5mm² |
conductor_section |
| Cable | free text | cable |
| Bus | free text | bus |
Cable and Bus are stored but unused. They are saved to the project, come back on reload, and appear in the dialog — but nothing reads them: no export, no report, no drawing. Fill them in if you want the data recorded for later; do not expect them to show up anywhere yet.
Appearance
| Field | What it does | XML attribute |
|---|---|---|
| Colour | the colour the line is drawn in | color |
| Two-colour | draws the line in two alternating colours | bicolor, color2 |
| Dash size | length of each colour segment when two-colour is on | dash-size |
| Style | solid, dashed, dotted, dash-dotted | style |
| Thickness | line width | condsize |
The label
| Field | What it does | XML attribute |
|---|---|---|
| Show text | draw the number, or hide it | displaytext |
| One text per folio | show the number once per potential per folio, on the longest conductor of that potential, and hide it on the rest | onetextperfolio |
| Size | text size, default 9 | numsize |
| Text colour | — | text_color |
| Rotation | angle for the label on horizontal and on vertical runs, default 0° and 270° | horizrotatetext, vertirotatetext |
| Alignment | where the label sits relative to the line | horizontal-alignment, vertical-alignment |
Conductors joined through elements form a potential — an equipotential net. "One text per folio" is what stops the same wire number being repeated a dozen times along one potential.
Single-line mode
Only drawn when the type is single-line:
| Field | What it draws | XML attribute |
|---|---|---|
| Phases | that many phase ticks across the line | phase |
| Neutral | the neutral symbol | neutral |
| Earth | the earth symbol | ground |
| Protective conductor (pen) | the PEN symbol | pen |
4. What feeds which export
This is the practical answer to "why is this field here". Blank fields become blank columns.
--export-cables — the from-to wiring list, one row per conductor:
| Column | Comes from |
|---|---|
| Folio | the folio the conductor is on |
| Component 1 / Terminal 1 | the element and terminal at one end |
| Component 2 / Terminal 2 | the element and terminal at the other end |
| Tension / Protocol | Tension / protocol |
| Wire colour | Wire colour (the text field, not the drawn colour) |
| Wire section | Wire section |
| Function | Function |
--export-wires produces the conductor-number list.
--export-wiring produces a from-to list too, but from the project
database rather than the document — and the database's conductor table
stores only the two terminals and the wire number. None of the documentation
fields above exist in it, so this export cannot carry tension, wire colour,
section or function. If you want those columns, use --export-cables.
See CLI reference for the commands, and Building a nomenclature query for the BOM/summary builder.
Seeing the list without exporting it
Project → Liste de câblage (base de données) shows the same from-to list in a window, one row per conductor:
| Column | |
|---|---|
| Fil | the wire number |
| Composant 1 / Borne 1 | the element and terminal at one end |
| Composant 2 / Borne 2 | the element and terminal at the other end |
| Folio | where the conductor is |
Rows are ordered by folio, then by wire number — numeric wire numbers first in
numeric order, so 9 comes before 10, then anything non-numeric as text.
Two things this window tells you that the CSV does not:
- It refreshes the database before querying, so a wire number you changed earlier in the session is already in the list.
- It counts what it left out. A conductor whose end is not attached to any element cannot appear in a from-to list, and the window says how many were excluded rather than presenting a short list as if it were complete. If that number is not zero, something on a folio is not connected to what you think.
Being database-backed, it carries the same limitation as --export-wiring: no
tension, wire colour, section or function columns, because the database does
not store them.
5. A note on cables
QElectroTech has no cable object. There is no cable in the data model, no cable table in the project database, and no way to group several conductors into one cable and give it a designation, a type or a core count.
What exists is smaller than the name suggests:
| Thing | What it really is |
|---|---|
| The Cable field on a conductor | free text, stored and reloaded, read by nothing |
The --export-cables command |
the from-to wiring list — one row per conductor, not per cable |
So a conductor can record which cable you intend it to belong to, and that text survives in the file, but nothing collects conductors into cables, checks core counts, or reports on them. If you need cable management, it has to live in the wire numbering convention or outside QElectroTech.
6. Routing and paths
A conductor routes itself between its two terminals. Drag any segment to shape it by hand, and that shape is saved with the project.
Ctrl+K — "Réinitialiser les conducteurs" discards hand-routing on the selected conductors and recalculates their paths automatically. It is the way out of a tangle, and it is not undoable by re-dragging — the original shape is gone.
Hand-routed shapes are stored as explicit segments. If a stored shape no longer matches where its terminals are — because something moved without the path being updated — QElectroTech quietly discards it on load and re-routes automatically. The drawing looks fine; the hand-routing is lost.
7. Colouring quickly
Select exactly one conductor and press F2 to open a colour picker for it. The shortcut does nothing with several conductors selected, or none.
A toolbar colour button that applies to every selected conductor at once, and sets the colour of the next conductor drawn, is proposed in PR #929. Until it merges, F2 one at a time — or Search & Replace for bulk changes.
There are no named conductor presets. A project has a single default set of conductor properties, not a library of named ones; the request for that is issue #461. Older documentation referring to a "project conductor list" describes something that does not exist.
8. Automatic behaviour while you draw
| Setting | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic conductor creation | Project menu / toolbar | when you place an element whose terminals land on existing ones, wires them up for you |
| Automatic conductor break | Project menu / toolbar | placing an element on an existing conductor splits it and connects both halves |
Both are per project, and both are toggles you can leave off.
See also
- User manual — the walkthrough for drawing wires
- Auto-numbering — how wire numbers are generated and frozen
- Linking wires across pages — folio reports
- Terminal strips — where conductors land on real terminals
- Search & Replace — changing many conductors at once
- CLI reference — the export commands above
- Mouse modifiers — Ctrl while dragging, and the rest
- Wire & cable catalogue — cable types, and what assigning one writes here
Getting Started
🌐 Languages — English · Français · Deutsch
Guides
Conductors — wire properties, what feeds which export, and cables
Wire & cable catalogue — cable types, IEC 60757 core colours, assigning a core to a conductor
Printing and exporting — paper, PDF, images, and what each path does differently
Linking elements — master, slave, terminal
PLC modules — I/O tables and linking a wire to a specific point
Using the element editor — drawing tools, saving, checks
Preferences reference — what each settings page does
Keyboard-only control — mouseless QET, and the one real gap
Mouse modifiers — what Shift, Ctrl and Alt change while you drag
Managing collections — folders, writability, building your own shortlist
Templates — reusable multi-element blocks, and why clicking one does nothing
Search & Replace — bulk property changes
Building a nomenclature query — the BOM/summary table builder
Linking wires across pages — folio reports
Variables & formulas — %f, %{label}, sequences
Auto-numbering — schemes, sequences, freezing
Terminal strips — strips, levels, bridges
Title block templates — the .titleblock format
Importing EPLAN parts (.edz) — EPLAN Data Portal
DXF import & export — two unrelated features, one format
The project database — the in-memory SQLite cache
Development
Automating QET — CLI, XML formats, external tools
CLI Reference — command line usage
JavaScript Scripting — --run, geometry editing, undo
Vision — proposal, under discussion
