Length of railing and fence as a property in IFC?

[aage.langedrag]

How do I get the length of railing and fence as a property in IFC via Data manager. Does not work correctly in current version of v2024. "Lengte()" shows correct for Railing but wrong for Fence when I read this in OIP.

2024-04-15_Railing og Fence hvordan hente ut lengde.vwx

[Scott Campbell]

Hi Åge --

It seems if one selects "Length(3d)" under "Specialized for Fence" in the Select Function dialog, we get a correct calculation.

 

What I don't understand is why the value returned is 0.003. The Fence in your file is 2.685 meters long. The returned value seems to be that value rounded and divided by 1000. 0.003 is the Length value for the Railing too, which you say shows correctly. Can you shed some light?

 

[aage.langedrag]

Hi @Scott Campbell,
Thanks for the reply where you show the Fence specific parameter. I keep forgetting that I have to look for these under "Expert formula". When I, who believe that I am quite interested in finding solutions, am "unable" to find this, I think that it should have been easier to find these parameters. Why isn't this simple in the "Simple formula" on relevant object types?????? The most relevant properties for all object types should be the properties that are always found. I also cannot see the length of the railing or Fence when I mark the object and look in OIP. Isn't this standard info? I greatly appreciate Vectorworks' great possibilities, but I am equally amazed at how much time I spend looking for very simple features and functions that I believe should have been visible to me without me having to test and search and search for help.

When it comes to rounding off the length of the Fence in the example model, this must be an error in the program. I haven't done anything special. I only selected the standard object type from the library so I wonder if the program doesn't understand that the file is set with Units in meters?

[Scott Campbell]

@aage.langedrag I will pass along your comments about finding parameters and expectations for info in the OIP. You make good points.

 

As for the rounding/reporting of the value, I’ll check further and see if I can find an explanation or a workaround. As you imply, I may have to buglist this too.

[Tom W.]

It's something to do with the units. I use millimetres in my files so didn't notice anything untoward. In your file if you change the doc unit to mm it returns the correct value. If you stick with metres but change the decimal precision from .001 to .000001 you will at least see 0.002685 instead of 0.003. Is IFC data in mm by default...? I know nothing about IFC.

 

Did a quick search + saw this (see Q1):