SamIWas

I've been making custom scripts and plugins for quite some time. But, I just noticed, I guess after a 2021 upgrade, that there are new options for script parameters (I assume these didn't exist . I got excited to see material and texture options, and a symbol definition. I was hoping these would allow me user-input of textures and symbols. But, they don't appear to do that. Can anyone explain how these are used, or if they don't actually do anything with point plug-ins unless they're set up a certain way?

Sigh...that's what happens when I don't finish reading the entire post and move on to the responses....🤔

Note that the eyedropper tool works on viewports with layer and class settings and is pretty immediate.

So THAT'S why so many of my scripts don't report what they used to.

Yeah...I've done the deal with PDFs for many years, ungrouping then dealing with the resultant parts. For some reason, I just missed that they were there since they were hidden and weren't selecting.

I just opened this back up to say that I found the issue. The lines were there, but were covered with a white rectangle, thus not appearing when I showed everything. I was sure I had deleted them, but apparently I had not.

I had imported a pdf, which I ungrouped to get normal lines. It brought in hundreds of thousands of lines, which of course bogged down the machine. I deleted all of it. Weeks later, I'm working on the drawing, and periodically when zooming or performing a move command, these phantom lines reappear for a few seconds before going away. Being that it's 100,000 of them, it causes a long pause on my MacBook Pro. I have turned on every class and layer, and the lines are not actually in the drawing. They are just phantoms showing up randomly. Any idea how to get rid of these...it's absolutely draining my workflow speed. I'm starting to think I will have to manually copy each and every existing thing to a new document...

Holy crap, man...that worked! This is going to make updating old files, and inserting new doors and windows, so much faster!

Thanks Pat! I'll try this tomorrow and see how it goes.

Holy schniekies. So, it looks like selecting a bunch of doors throughout a document and trying to change records in this way wouldn't work very well. What I was trying to do was create a script that would assign my default class scheme to doors that I pull in from older drawings.

The test script is set to give me an alert box with the handle. If I put the door alone in the drawing, it returns a series of numbers. When I put the door in the wall, and select only the door, I get a blank.

With the lighting device, I can just use SetRField and GetRField to get and set info for the lighting device. With door, this doesn't seem to work. As a test, I used GetRField(h,'Door','2DLeafClass') and GetRField(h,'Door','2D Leaf Class'). but neither works. Is there different way to get and set door info via script? EDIT: I have found that it works when the door is not in a wall. But, once the door is placed in a wall, I can no longer get the script to pull info from it. Surely there is a way.

Yeah, I already do that via text files. It's just an extra step in the process. I know that a direct, immediate, and automatically updating connection is possible with Filemaker via ODBC. I've gotten it working briefly on small projects, but it is mind bogglingly difficult. I'm hoping for VW and FM to work together to make a solution with easy, automatic connection between the two. FM Is so powerful when it comes to tracking and reporting data.

I just want FileMaker connection. I don’t even have excel.

Dear god, please make this work with FileMaker. That would be worth the cost of the program alone for me. Well, maybe worth $1000. please please please

Are you saying you have a spreadsheet outside of Vectorworks and want to import that spreadsheet, match each line to a symbol, and apply the data from that spreadsheet to the symbols, filling the necessary record format(s)? If so, yes. I have dozens of scripts which do this. Each symbol/lighting device/plug-in has a unique ID, and the script matches the data from each line to the symbol using that. It's can get quite complicated. The basics are to use OPEN(filename) and then create a loop to read each line and separate each cell into a variable. Find any symbol which matches the key variable, and SETRFIELD to apply the variables to the records fields.

Oh, well, that's just mean. If there's some new great way of sending and receiving data from external sources (particularly Filemaker), I'm going to be quite a happy camper.

🥴 See! I knew it was that easy and that I just overlooked something. Thanks Joshua!

I feel like this is one of those moments where 'm going to smack my head into the desk when/if someone gets me the answer, but i'm just too brain-tired right now to get it. I have a bunch of custom tools which are in a tool pallete. I just got a StreamDeck, and want to be able to call those tools from it. Since there are only a few keyboard shortcuts left, those aren't a good solution to calling them. My other solution is to create a script which calls the tools my name. But DoMenuTextByName doesn't work for this. I don't want it to create and place the tool, just activate it. Anyone got any solutions here?

If 2021 has some new way of handling shortcuts, I'll be all for it. If they also fix the script-limit issue which has been around for 8-9 years now, that'll be enough for me!

I made this request many years ago, but I'll try again. There are now so many menu items and so many tools, that the basic keyboard shortcuts aren't cutting it. There are only so many combinations of keys and ways you can contort your hands to run shortcuts. And most of the possible shortcuts are already taken. And with the rise in automated things like streamdeck and programmable mice, being able to further expand shortcuts would be very handy. This also benefits people like myself who build large custom workspaces with custom tools and scripts. I again propose a system like Cinema 4Ds. In addition to Command-X (or Control-X), or Command-Option-Shift-X, allow hierarchical double-key shortcuts. For instance, to grab the mirror tool in Cinema 4D, you press M then H (M for a mesh list, and H for mirror). This increases the available shortcuts by multiple times and allows easy programmability for other devices. The current shortcut system is limited to just over 200 shortcuts. That's a lot, and it does cover the most-used tools. But those, combined with double-key shortcuts could easily allow for well over 1000. Obviously, this would probably kill some current shortcuts, and would require a change in muscle memory, but there would be a lot of gain on the other side.

I, for one, do not agree. The old icons look sterile and institutional.

Yes...this is the issue. Yep. This is what I do often. But, when you rotate, especially with "adjust flipped text" on, things get really funky. Sometimes, the fields stay in order. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes, they flop to odd locations. Sometimes, they don't. The basic labels all work just fine, including the Universe/Address field. I made my own custom field to deal with this issue, but then it sucks sending to other people.

This is what I do currently. And it works, but is error prone if I forget to run the script. This is something I need to look into. Maybe that would;d be a decent short-term solution.

I have never had this issue before, but it popped up yesterday. I do need to update to the newest service pack (which is happening currently...sloooowwly). I've been working on 2020 SP3.1. I've been working on a large drawing, and every now and then, I have to hit undo (obviously). There have been several times recently where I hit undo, and it steps back some 10-15 minutes worth of work, completely erasing everything that was done in that span. And redo does not appear to bring it back. Has anyone else seen this behavior? And just now I found that VW had not done the most recent backup or two (autosave every five minutes), so I lost all that work. 😡