Cable Routing¶

Cable routing connects NetBox's native dcim.Cable objects to the physical pathways they traverse. This is the core integration point between NetBox's device/cable inventory and Pathways' physical infrastructure documentation.

Cable Segments¶

A Cable Segment represents one section of a cable's physical route through a single pathway. A cable's complete route is an ordered sequence of segments.

Aerial Overlashing¶

In aerial plant, a fiber cable is sometimes mechanically lashed onto another cable rather than carrying its own support strand. Over time, an aerial span can accumulate a stack of cables all wrapped together by the same lash wire -- one cable installed, then a second lashed onto it, then a third onto that, and so on. From a load-and-handling perspective, all cables in that wrap share the same lashing.

The plugin captures this with Lashed With: a symmetric ManyToManyField between CableSegment instances. Adding a peer to one segment automatically adds this segment to the peer's lashed_with set -- there is no "host" or "guest" distinction. Each segment in the bundle is equally lashed with every other.

Lashing is per-segment, not per-cable, because a cable can be partly overlashed (aerial segments) and partly not (underground segments along the same route).

Note: lashed_with is pairwise symmetric, not transitive. If A is lashed with B and B is lashed with C, that does not automatically mean A is lashed with C -- the user must add each pair explicitly. The form's multi-select makes this fast: when adding a new cable segment to an existing bundle of N peers, select all N at once. A future enhancement could introduce a LashingBundle model to capture group identity directly; for now, the bundle is implicit in the graph.

To find every cable a given segment is lashed with: segment.lashed_cables (a @property returning a Cable queryset of every peer segment's cable).

If a peer cable is not modeled in NetBox (foreign plant, e.g. another carrier's cable), leave that peer out and record the relationship in the segment's comments.

Example Route¶

A cable running from Building A to Building B might have this route:

Choosing a pathway on the Route tab¶

The Route tab offers the pathways connected to the point the route has reached. For the first segment that is the cable's A termination, resolved to pathways infrastructure through the terminating device's location and its parent locations, structures at those locations, the structure linked to the site in Site Geometry, and the remaining structures in the site. For later segments the candidates are both endpoints of the previous pathway: a pathway is drawn in whichever direction the surveyor drew it, so which end the cable arrives at cannot be read off the model, and offering both always includes the right one.

The tab lists what it resolved for both cable ends. When an end cannot be placed in the plant the tab says so and the picker falls back to every pathway, so routing is never blocked -- the usual cause is a site with nothing modeled in Pathways yet, fixed by linking the site to a structure in Site Geometry or by setting a site or location on your structures.

Use Show all pathways to search the full list at any time; the filter is a starting point, not a restriction.

Conduit Banks¶

Conduit banks organize the conduit openings on a structure. This is essential for field documentation — crews need to know exactly which opening to use.

Bank Configuration¶

Bank Positions¶

Conduits assigned to a bank get a Bank Position using a grid notation:

• Row letter + column number: A1, A2, B1, B2, etc.
• Row A is the top row, column 1 is the leftmost
• Each position in a bank is unique

Encasement Types¶

Conduit Junctions¶

A conduit junction models a Y-tee where a branch conduit connects to a trunk conduit at a point along its span. Conduit endpoints can reference junctions instead of structures, enabling mid-span branching.

Key attributes:

• Trunk Conduit — The main conduit
• Branch Conduit — The branching conduit
• Towards Structure — Which end of the trunk the junction faces
• Position on Trunk — Normalized value (0.0 = start, 1.0 = end)

Creating Cable Segments¶

1. Navigate to Plugins > Pathways > Cable Segments
2. Click Add
3. Select the Cable and Pathway
4. Set the Sequence number (determines route order)
5. Optionally record Lashed With peers and Comments
6. Save and add more segments for the full route

Pull Sheets¶

Once cable segments are configured, the system can generate pull sheets — field documents showing the complete cable route. See Pull Sheets for details.