In this paper, by introducing a concept of consulting design and based on the connection between factorial design theory and coding theory, we obtain combinatorial identities that relate the wordlength pattern of a regular mixed factorial design to that of its consulting design. According to these identities, we further-more establish the general and unified rules for idejntifying mini-mum aberration mixed factorial designs through their consulting designs. It is an improvement and generalization of the results in Mukerjee and Wu (2001).