Report/worksheet of cable ends/lengths/type

[ldeikis]

I'm back into VW after a several year hiatus--the cable tool has changed a ton from a rogue plugin to... something.  Anyway, I'm simply trying to get a report of my cable runs, listing starting device, ending device, and length of run (ideally both drawn length and parts).  I need this in order to generate cable labels.  I'd also love a worksheet of my distributor devices with the attributes of their records, too.   I'm quite sure it's simple but I'll be darned if it isn't confounding me.  Does anyone have any bright tips?  I'm nearly to the point of opening a spreadsheet and making such a thing manually from my cable lables, but that's so anathema to what VW is supposed to be about.

 

Thank you.

 

Luke

[Scott C. Parker]

The new tools lack some of the old reporting abilities. We're working on it.
Here's a file with worksheets I use while testing internal cable tool files. 
Let me know how they work for you and what other info is needed. Yes, I know we need more and I have a list. Always looking for input.

Thanks, ScottCableDistroWorksheetsSCP.vwx

[Sam Jones]

@Scott C. Parker Do you have a file with actual objects that the worksheets can report.  The data base headers are very helpful, but it is not always clear what they are reporting.  I'm working on label printing and would like to create reports for them to use.

 

TIA

[ldeikis]

3 hours ago, Scott C. Parker said:

The new tools lack some of the old reporting abilities. We're working on it.
Here's a file with worksheets I use while testing internal cable tool files. 
Let me know how they work for you and what other info is needed. Yes, I know we need more and I have a list. Always looking for input.

Thanks, ScottCableDistroWorksheetsSCP.vwx

Scott that's quite helpful, and provided a good example to build a distributor label worksheet that works for me.

What I'm still struggling to achieve, though, is generate a worksheet that understands what each end of a data cable is connected to.  I believe they're correctly associating with the distributor objects, as if I drag the distributor the cables follow and adjust length etc automatically...  but I can't find where VW is acknowledging the start/end nodes so that I can try to reference it in the worksheets.  In the OID for a drawn data cable, START and END aren't fillable boxes, which suggests that they're calculated based on the distributor objects' parameters...  but nothing I enter in the distributor objects' own OID seems to transfer there or show up in a worksheet.  Do you have any idea what I'm overlooking?

 

Thanks

[Scott C. Parker]

@ldeikis Data cables? Are you trying to connect two cables to devices, power and data? When the cable tools were rebuilt to support 3D and Braceworks calculations and add power calculations, Vectorworks's first round dealt with power. Sadly, data was left for the future. The cables enter connection info for power circuit connections but not the data cable connections into the OIP of devices with both fields.

You have the option to restore the old version via the Workspace Editor. They're listed in the folder tree shown in this screenshot.

 

 

If I were still doing shows and didn't need the 3D/power functions offered by our current tools, I would use the expanded functionality of @Sam Jones's version of the old cable tools offered in Autoplot. As the current Spotlight Product Planner here at VW HQ, I can say the cable tools are in active development to bring back all the power of the old tools and then some. I've been a thorn in some sides about this. 😇  Sam's reports are amazing.

 

If I do not understand the issue and it's not about data being separate, please share a file so we can take a look.