Find and Modify

[RobbieButler]

Hi there,

 

Is it possible to select objects within a range of certain parameters. 

For example, I'm using spotlight and would love to be able to select channels x through y so that I can edit them, rather than have to select them all individually which would be really tedious. 

 

Cheers!

 

Rx

[markdd]

Not that I'm aware of. Sam Jones's Autoplot set of tools has a command that will do this (select by Channel range) http://www.autoplotvw.com

Edited January 31, 2018 by markdd

[Pat Stanford]

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.

[markdd]

6 minutes ago, 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.

I'm not sure how you would ask for a range of channels. 

[Pat Stanford]

Could you paste a simple file with a few lights in a couple of different ranges. I will take a look to see how to select the range, but I don't the the time, energy, or knowledge to create a range of lights.

[markdd]

Hi

 

Here is a very simple layout of instruments with a typical numbering system. 

 

Thanks for helping.

 

Mark

Find Modify.vwx

[Pat Stanford]

Using the More Choices button will let you put in top and bottom bounds for a range.

 

 

Gives the following selection:

 

Ask again if this is not clear.

[markdd]

I'm no mathematician or coder, but I understand that! I can see this being really helpful. Thanks

[mjm]

Pat: stellar reveal of existing solutions. Was needing this literally ten minutes ago, as well as yesterday several times.

[Sam Jones]

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.

 

[mjm]

 

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.

Edited February 1, 2018 by mjm

[Pat Stanford]

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.

[Sam Jones]

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...

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.

[RobbieButler]

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.