Jump to content
  • 0

RobbieButler

Question

13 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0

Pat is an amazing source for understanding the subtleties of VW.  They should pay him.

In Addition...  Choosing the record field you want can be extraordinarily tedious if there any number of records in your document that have large numbers of fields.  One thing that can help with that is typing the first letter of the name of the record you want will jump to the first record that begins with that letter, for example "L" for Lighting Device.  Pat's example of multiple criteria will cover the majority of what you want to do.  Pay attention to the first dialog that comes up giving you a choice of "Select", "Select Only", or "Deselect".  You can use these in sequential commands to refine your search.  It would be nicer if the command had the "Contains" and "Not Contains" operators.

That being said; if I had to use the custom selection command to make these kinds of selections, I would kill myself, ...  but then I have other options that don't ship with Spotlight.

 

Link to comment
  • 0

 

Sam: may I say that your tools keep me from personal blood-letting over and over again. One of the great advantages of Sam's Channel range selector is it's useful ability to select discontigous ranges  and speed of doing so.

Screen Shot 2018-02-01 at 12.54.56 PM.png

Edited by mjm
Link to comment
  • 0

Hard to implement this kind of ranging in the automatic criteria dialog box.  

 

In the criteria builder, criteria rows that use are same category (Class, Field Value, etc.) are logically OR'd together. So you could do =1 OR =2 OR =7 to get objects that match any of those values.

 

If you do  >=1 OR <=5 you will get all the objects with values of 1 through 5.

 

If you do >=1 OR <=7 OR >=9 OR <=13 OR =22, you will not get the result you want. For this you could build a more complicated version by hand that would effectively say:

 

(>=1 AND <=7) OR (>=9 AND <=13) OR =22

 

Hopefully someday the criteria builder will improve and you will be able to do this kind of ranging. Until then, if you are doing lights, just buy AutoPlot from Sam and be done with it. Less than 1 hour of time saved during the year will more than pay for it. And it will save you much more time than that.

Link to comment
  • 0

Thank you for the nice words.  Avoiding the self promotion, to the extent my ego will let me, here is another simple limitation of the custom selection tool.

It is not just the lack of "Contains" and "Not Contains" operators that limit custom selection, it is the lack of the "and" operator.

The Custom Selection dialog below will select all the lights that have 1 criteria OR the other...

5a7411380831d_ScreenShot2018-02-01at11_19_21PM.thumb.png.bfa70bcd8776caa9733e80f2125f93f4.png

selecting all the lights that have the Color value of "R 32"  and selecting all the lights with the Position value of  "Pipe 1"  when what is really desired are only the lights that have BOTH values, i.e  all the lights on Pipe 1 that have the color R 32.  There are many more common combinations of criteria that cannot be achieved with the custom selection tool.  Made a little old college TD take up vectorscript.

Link to comment
  • 0
On 31/01/2018 at 4:01 PM, Pat Stanford said:

The Custom Selection menu command has the ability to do this, but you will need to know the exact Records and Fields that you need to use.

 

It will even allow you to save a script with a given setup so that you can just run the script the next time you need that collection of objects.

 

Thanks a million Pat! That's it sorted. :)

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Answer this question...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...