Drawing registers

[nikihoops]

Hi all,

 

 I'm trying to create a 'clever' drawing register. I've created a worksheet data object and its on a sheet; looks great etc. However when I change the name of a sheet for example it doesn't update on the worksheet - I have tried recalculating it. This is also the same with adding revisions. I have my own sheets set up with title blocks that all seem to work fine. 

 

I've looked online for videos/explanations with no luck.

 

Can anyone point me in the right direction/give me some pointers? 

Example.vwx

[Boh]

12 hours ago, line-weight said:

@Boh Do either of the worksheets work OK when you want to include a drawing in an issue which hasn't had a revision since the last issue?

 

For example, in "third issue B3" from your screenshots above, if issue 3 had included "elevations proposed" but issued again as revision B (rather than a new revision C)?

@line-weight Yes I just did a test and that works ok. The latest revision number is always included in the last issue. As you say this is so close to working the way I want it to...

 

[Boh]

Hi @Nikolay Zhelyazkov

So I'm now trying to use the Title Block Manager for Issue/revision/dcoument control on a real project.

 

The project has 80+ sheets of drawings. Issue 1 was fine. I got exactly what I expected with: two worksheets listing all the issued drawings with their revision numbers. (I added revision numbers to unrevised drawings simply so they would show up as issued). It looked like this:

 

All the sheets are there, all nicely in order.

 

Now I have tried to update the worksheets as I have issued 3 revised drawings - one is a previously issued revised drawing, the other 2 are new drawings. Unfortunately the second worksheet has completely disapeared and on the first worksheet the sheets listed have reordered so the 3x new issue drawings are at the top of the list. How can I keep the second sheet and how can I keep the drawings listing in sheet order? It looks like this:

 

 

Please give me some advice on this. I have no idea what to do.

 

Thanks

 

[Boh]

@Nikolay Zhelyazkov I see what has happened. On the second issue the worksheets were only recalculated for the 3 sheets that were issued. The first issue are not maintained on the sheets. This is why the second sheet is missing and the remaining worksheet has the three current issues (issue#2) listed at the top. The sheets listed below are just the remnant cells from the first issue that were not affected by the reclaculation so they weren't changed.

 

Is this working as designed? I want all sheets listed whether or not they are in the current issue. Do I have to issue every sheet each issue? Standard practice here is to only issue new or revised sheets.

 

Edit: Ok I think I have figured it out. In the TBM you select your new/revised sheets for the new issue, add the issue, then, before leaving the TBM, you go back and select all your construction sheets again, i.e. all the old and new issues. Only the selected sheets are recalculated for the worksheets so to see the complete construction set in the worksheets they all need to be selected before leaving the TBM.

 

Edited July 26, 2020 by Boh

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

Hello @Boh,

 

Sorry for the late reply. You seem to have figured this out yourself, but still, let me give you some info.

 

When you are creating multiple pages report from the TBM, it is filling it with data from the selected sheets only (from the TBM selection). If you want to always have all sheets in the reports, you can create database reports (multiple pages unchecked), but database reports are always 1 page and can get pretty long.

 

As for the cleaning of the old reports, our goal was to give the users the ability to customize their reports. Therefore, we delete only what will be overwritten, aka, what is specified in the TBM as starting row and number of rows. That is why you had the rows after issue 3 not deleted and this is WAD.

 

Let me know if you have any additional questions.

 

Best Regards,

Nikolay Zhelyazkov

[Boh]

Thanks @Nikolay Zhelyazkov. Yes I’ve got there in the end. It’s not the most intuitive process tho is it?
Having the select sheets at the bottom of the TBM window makes it easy to miss and when it shld be the first place you go it seems odd to place it at the bottom of the page. 
 

If the select sheets window could be incorporated into of the main window then it might be better as there is a lot of ping ponging between windows.

 

e,g. If I want to do some multi revisions on some sheets then issue them along with reissuing some others it’s:

open TBM

select sheets to revise

add revisions

select sheets to issue

add issues
select all sheets that have ever been issued

“ok” out of TBM

 

That requires hitting the select sheets button 3x . If you accidentally select the wrong sheets then double it.

 

Anyways, let’s hoping it’s smooth sailing from here.... 
 

Cheers

[line-weight]

@Boh have you been successfully using these since your last post, nearly three years ago now?

[line-weight]

Also, a question for @Nikolay Zhelyazkov:

 

I have a drawing file with many sheets and titleblocks in it, but I only want to show some of them in the "Project Revision History" worksheet.

 

The reason for this is that some drawings sheets are just used for my own purposes, or perhaps for ad-hoc drawings to send to people for enquiries, and so on. There are only certain sheets that I want to include in my "formal" set of drawings that will be tracked in a drawing issue register.

 

I can't see how to exclude certain sheets/titleblocks from appearing in the "Project Revision History" worksheet.

[Tom W.]

23 hours ago, line-weight said:

Also, a question for @Nikolay Zhelyazkov:

 

I have a drawing file with many sheets and titleblocks in it, but I only want to show some of them in the "Project Revision History" worksheet.

 

The reason for this is that some drawings sheets are just used for my own purposes, or perhaps for ad-hoc drawings to send to people for enquiries, and so on. There are only certain sheets that I want to include in my "formal" set of drawings that will be tracked in a drawing issue register.

 

I can't see how to exclude certain sheets/titleblocks from appearing in the "Project Revision History" worksheet.

 

I'd be interested to know where you get with this. I created my own version of the Drawing Issue Register worksheet which  includes a 'Revision No.' column + in order to specify which sheets are included + which not I added an 'Include in Drawing Issue Register' check box in my TBB:

 

 

But I'm not sure if there was another way to have done it, for example I thought that 'Activate title block' might perform the same function but I don't think it did...

[line-weight]

Yes, I thought that this was what (unticking) "activate title block" was about, but it didn't seem to make any difference.

 

How do you make that "include in drawing issue register" tickbox appear?

[Tom W.]

9 hours ago, line-weight said:

How do you make that "include in drawing issue register" tickbox appear?

 

In the TBB style settings in the 'Sheet Data' pane you have the 'Manage Sheet Data' settings: I added a field called 'Include in Drawing Issue Register', set it to Boolean (default: False) + put a tick in the Display column to have it show up in the dialog.

 

Then in my Drawing Issue Register worksheet I make sure only TBBs with this setting enabled are searched for:

 

 

This means however I'm using my own worksheet rather than the one generated within the TBB. This is fine as I was doing this anyway because I wanted the Revision Number included in the issue register but it does mean that I can't produce an issue register across multiple files which I believe can only be done via the Title Block Manager.

 

I don't actually need to produce drawing issues very often so not had masses of experience doing it... but when I have done it's worked well... (apart from the issue order being back to front: couldn't figure out how to correct this so ended up reordering the columns manually as was in a rush)

 

[line-weight]

On 4/16/2023 at 9:46 AM, Tom W. said:

 

In the TBB style settings in the 'Sheet Data' pane you have the 'Manage Sheet Data' settings: I added a field called 'Include in Drawing Issue Register', set it to Boolean (default: False) + put a tick in the Display column to have it show up in the dialog.

 

Then in my Drawing Issue Register worksheet I make sure only TBBs with this setting enabled are searched for:

 

 

This means however I'm using my own worksheet rather than the one generated within the TBB. This is fine as I was doing this anyway because I wanted the Revision Number included in the issue register but it does mean that I can't produce an issue register across multiple files which I believe can only be done via the Title Block Manager.

 

I don't actually need to produce drawing issues very often so not had masses of experience doing it... but when I have done it's worked well... (apart from the issue order being back to front: couldn't figure out how to correct this so ended up reordering the columns manually as was in a rush)

 

 

Ok. Thanks.

 

It seems like maybe I can get something workable using my own custom worksheet, but it still feels like all this is way more difficult than it ought to be. A drawing issue register is pretty fundamental to any architectural job, but the process of setting one up in VW is obscure and convoluted.

 

It doesn't seem like very much has changed since this thread was started, now 5 years ago.

[line-weight]

On 4/16/2023 at 9:46 AM, Tom W. said:

 

In the TBB style settings in the 'Sheet Data' pane you have the 'Manage Sheet Data' settings: I added a field called 'Include in Drawing Issue Register', set it to Boolean (default: False) + put a tick in the Display column to have it show up in the dialog.

 

Then in my Drawing Issue Register worksheet I make sure only TBBs with this setting enabled are searched for:

 

 

In principle another way this could be done (using a custom worksheet) is by searching only for TBBs with a certain style, is that right?

 

So I could have a "formal issue" TBB style, and then just use this TBB style for any sheets I want to include in my drawing register.

[Tom W.]

Yes or if it's easier have the same TBB but put them on different classes.

[line-weight]

I'm confused about how the preformatted "Project Revision History" report works.

 

Does it have some kind of special status that is different from a normal report, that allows it to automatically update itself after changes made in the title block manager?

 

I've not really used reports much so far, but this afternoon learnt what a "database row" is, and I think I understand how it works.

 

The preformatted "Project Revision History" report has no "database row" though, so how does it pull information from the TBBs? When I try and edit the preformatted report it looks like this

 

 

...as if there should be a database row at row 12, but there isn't. But when I read through this thread and there is discussion of @boh's custom version, for example here, there is a database row.

 

I also have no idea what the "substring" formulas in the day/month/year fields are or do exactly, but they are clearly essential for the functioning of the worksheet, so it seems like I can't just build my custom sheet from scratch because that bit is beyond my knowledge.

 

 

At the bottom of this page in the VW help, there is a section about custom worksheets using project revisions and issues, with some formulas and not much explanation about exactly how to use them. I can maybe try and work this out, but at first glance it looks like to use this method, I have to manually set up a column for each drawing issue, so if I have a project where I think I am going to have 99 drawing issues I need to set up 99 columns manually. Is that right?

[Tom W.]

10 minutes ago, line-weight said:

as if there should be a database row at row 12, but there isn't.

 

You need to enable Database Headers (View menu):

[line-weight]

1 hour ago, Tom W. said:

 

You need to enable Database Headers (View menu):

 

Aha! Thanks.

[line-weight]

So here is the next problem.

 

If I just use the provided "Title Block Project Revision History" worksheet, the one that the Title Block Manager creates, and then updates each time I do anything in the Title Block Manager, things basically work OK, but I need to customise the worksheet, in order to do things like exclude certain sheets, as discussed above.

 

But as soon as I make a customised worksheet, it gets unlinked from whatever the process is, that the TBM does, that automagically updates the worksheet. To update my customised worksheet, I have to select and "recalculate" it. That's not necessarily a big problem; I can live with doing the update manually.

 

The problem is that it gets frozen at showing a certain number of drawing issues. For example, if at the point in time where I create my custom worksheet, I have done 3 drawing issues, they will be there, with the oldest issue (#1) in column 1 and the newest issue (#3) in column 3. But if I then do another issue (#4), it appears in column 3, with issue #3 in column 2 and issue #2 in column 1, and issue #1 disappears. So...once I get to, say, issue #11 my worksheet looks like this:

 

 

That's not what I want; I want to be able to see all the issues since the beginning.

 

I think I can see why this happens: the record "Title Block Issue Data-1" which appears in various formulas throughout the worksheet (such as below) does not refer to the first issue but the most recent issue.

 

 

And so, the thing that the TBM somehow does when it updates the default worksheet, shunts all the columns along so that the one with the oldest issue data is in the first column, and the furthest-right one has the newest issue data.

 

I can't see how to make this process happen on a custom worksheet, so it seems like my only option is to set up the columns so that issue data-1 is in the leftmost column, then manually set each subsequent column with issue data-2, issue data-3, and so on up to issue data-99 or however many issues I think I'll eventually need.

 

And then live with the fact that the newest/current issue will be in the left-most column.

 

(I think this is the same thing you ran into with the column order @Tom W. that you mentioned above)

[Tom W.]

2 minutes ago, line-weight said:

And so, the thing that the TBM somehow does when it updates the default worksheet, shunts all the columns along so that the one with the oldest issue data is in the first column, and the furthest-right one has the newest issue data.

 

I can't see how to make this process happen on a custom worksheet, so it seems like my only option is to set up the columns so that issue data-1 is in the leftmost column, then manually set each subsequent column with issue data-2, issue data-3, and so on up to issue data-99 or however many issues I think I'll eventually need.

 

And then live with the fact that the newest/current issue will be in the left-most column.

 

(I think this is the same thing you ran into with the column order @Tom W. that you mentioned above)

 

Yes it is. Each time I issue a new set of drawings I have to reorder those columns. I would love to know how to deal with this as it's quite annoying. But I so infrequently need to generate a drawing issue register that I've managed to ignore it so far.

[line-weight]

Oh... but I can't pre-format those columns to pick up future issue data, because if those future issues haven't happened yet, there is no issue data record for them yet.

 

So, yeah, I have to go and fiddle with the worksheet itself each time I do a new drawing issue, which kind of partly defeats the purpose of having a clever worksheet to do this, instead of just doing it all manually.

 

@Nikolay Zhelyazkov can you help?

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

Hello all,

 

From what I understand you want to add some customization to the Project Revision History report and still have it update from the TB Manager, right?

 

If so, here is an image showing what can be customized in this report and where can extra columns be added without breaking the automation.

 

The extra column functionality will be working only with database row worksheets. If you want to select which sheets/TBBs are in the report, you will have to make the TB Manager create multiple pages/worksheets, which means that non database worksheets will be created and the TB Manager will manually write all the data on each update (worksheet update will not do anything since there will be no database rows). Anyway, we have database worksheet filtering in our plans for future TB Manager updates, so keep your eyes open. 🙂

 

Let me know if I have not covered any of your questions or if you need any further information.

 

Best Regards,

Nikolay Zhelyazkov

[line-weight]

6 hours ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

From what I understand you want to add some customization to the Project Revision History report and still have it update from the TB Manager, right?

 

If it doesn't update from the TB Manager, and I have to manually "recalculate" the worksheet, that's OK for me.

 

However:

 

1. I want to be able to select which TBs are included/excluded (therefore I have to change some things inside your red boxes)

 

2. Each time I make changes and update/recalculate the worksheet, I want to have it show all drawing issues that have happened since the beginning.

 

3. Ideally, the drawing issue columns would go from left to right (with the most recent issue on the right), but I can live with it being listed right to left (with the most recent issue being on the left). The main thing is that all drawing issues are shown.

 

I'd like to know how many of these 3 things are possible.

[Tom W.]

9 hours ago, line-weight said:

3. Ideally, the drawing issue columns would go from left to right (with the most recent issue on the right), but I can live with it being listed right to left (with the most recent issue being on the left).

 

This is my issue. I would much rather NOT live with the most recent issue on the left. I would much rather they ran chronologically from left to right. It is a pain reordering them manually.

 

Points 1. + 2. are absolutely possible + working in my report.

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

10 hours ago, line-weight said:

 

If it doesn't update from the TB Manager, and I have to manually "recalculate" the worksheet, that's OK for me.

 

However:

 

1. I want to be able to select which TBs are included/excluded (therefore I have to change some things inside your red boxes)

 

2. Each time I make changes and update/recalculate the worksheet, I want to have it show all drawing issues that have happened since the beginning.

 

3. Ideally, the drawing issue columns would go from left to right (with the most recent issue on the right), but I can live with it being listed right to left (with the most recent issue being on the left). The main thing is that all drawing issues are shown.

 

I'd like to know how many of these 3 things are possible.

 

1) This is possible if you create multiple pages/worksheets. However, then you cannot add extra columns and have to use the TB Manager every time to update the data for you. The other way to go for this is to change the criteria of the database report and make it show only the active TBBs or use some custom field as mentioned in this thread. The TBManager will not overwrite the criteria so it will remain the one that you set even after an update:

 

2) will be covered if you go for one of the workflows mentioned in 1

 

3) is not possible at this time. I will add a wishlist item in our database so that it can be considered for future improvements. The only way to go around this is to manually reorder the worksheet formulas and then do not use the TB Manager to update the report as it will overwrite them again.

 

[_James]

2 hours ago, Tom W. said:

I would much rather NOT live with the most recent issue on the left. I would much rather they ran chronologically from left to right. It is a pain reordering them manually.

 

This is mainly the reason I stopped trying to make a 'smart' revision sheet work - it sounds trivial but there is no way I could tell the rest of the office "yeah it works very well all you need to do is delve into each formula and rewrite it to make sure the most recent revision is on the right each time you revise a drawing". 

 

They would look at me like i'm insane! 

 

Both the above and better functionality for splitting the worksheets up over multiple pages (or "Pagination" as I see it being referred to) are pretty much dealbreakers for me. I understand that "pagination" is being worked on, but unfortunately it's in the "Active Research" section of the roadmap so it could be a while.

[_James]

Nonetheless, I really appreciate @Nikolay Zhelyazkovcoming on here trying to help, thanks Nikolay!