Live area value for record field

[timking]

Just getting into records to build external development models and have a problem. I have a polygon, say, and want its area to appear in the 'Area' field. I can type it in manually (long and boring when there are '00s-000's) but this is hopeless once the poly's start to be resized. A Property Line report does it, and if I could link a cell there to the record field maybe that would be ok? But a bit clunky, and I also want to do the same thing for other qualities such as 'length', perimeter', etc.

Surely there's a nice simple solution?

Tim

[michaelk]

If you have a worksheet you can call the areas of the polygons and the record field and copy paste from the area to the record. (or just use the area call).

hth

mk

[timking]

I was hoping to avoid any manual cut and paste. We're urban designers so there'll be thousands of shapes to manage, and it's the constant changes as a design develops we want to capture.

So I take it you're also suggesting we can use a worksheet to return all the geometric quantification (area, length, perimeter, etc), then the record field is referenced to the worksheet cell. Correct? We're beginners at this - can't find the method for referencing. Help?

Might be worth mentioning we're exporting the record data to an external database.

Tim

[AlanW]

Hi, if you use classes for each type of area you need to calculate this worksheet arrangement works, but you get the idea about breaking the drawing into classes as needed to retrieve things you need.

You can add additional criteria like perimeter etc.

HTH

Edited January 20, 2016 by Alan Woodwell

[timking]

Yes, worksheets and classes is how we do it now. This gives us a whole lot of information which we manually take out to build a 'development model' (consisting of all sorts of things like market factors, development period, cost of finance etc). External database. Hence my idea to use records (which also gives me the chance to manipulate some of the geometry from within the record. The 'design model' (ie the shapes within VW) is constantly changed, so I really don't want to do any of this manually.

I think we've maybe found the answer by scripting, but jeez, my eyeballs are beginning to bleed. I didn't sign up for this. To paraphrase Goebells (I think) - When I see the word 'Scripting', I reach for my gun.

Suicide, obviously - Tim

[timking]

A postscript - solving the issue WITHOUT SCRIPTING!! The answer was in (re)discovering the Plugin editor. The Property Line tool was close, it just needed several extra fields. It produces a report with a few clicks and the data in that can be export to an Excel sheet via odbc. We now don't need an external database - Excel is fine for the full development model.

All the other features of modifying by record also seem to work for what we want.

The Plugin Editor has now gone to my all-time favourite VW feature!

t