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

[line-weight]

@Nikolay Zhelyazkov I think it is really critical that we are able to retrospectively edit "issue" information.

 

I've just had an experience where for some reason, VW decided that a new drawing that I created within the last couple days had already been included in several drawing issues some weeks ago.

 

My guess is that this might have happened because I created it by duplicating an existing drawing.

 

I thought I might have to either reconstruct the entire issue sequence, or manually block out the cells in the worksheet where the wrong information was showing.

 

In the end I managed to sort it by going to that specific TBB and editing its "issue data" - deleted the issues it shouldn't have been in and luckily got what I wanted in the drawing register ... but I didn't feel entirely in control of the process and this is definitely not what you want when you are under a bit of time pressure to issue a large set of drawings.

 

One thing that is not clear to me is exactly how the "issue data" and "revision data" are connected to each other.

 

For example, if I go into the issue data of an individual TBB and see this:

 

 

I can see that I can delete some or all of those issues (for this TBB) but let's say that I want to change my drawing register so that it was revision B of this drawing that was included in issue no. 3, instead of revision C - can I do that?

 

Highlighting one of the issues and pressing "edit" doesn't let me see or change that information.

 

Also, presumably if I "edit" one of these issues, then I edit it for the whole file? Because it doesn't make any sense to edit, for example, the date of an issue, just relating to one TBB. Assuming that's the case it feels wrong that I am able to edit something that applies to multiple TBBs when I've got there from an interface that's about one specific TBB.

 

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

Hello @line-weight,

 

6 hours ago, line-weight said:

I've just had an experience where for some reason, VW decided that a new drawing that I created within the last couple days had already been included in several drawing issues some weeks ago.

 

My guess is that this might have happened because I created it by duplicating an existing drawing.

- I suppose so too. Duplicating an object gets all the data with it.

 

6 hours ago, line-weight said:

I can see that I can delete some or all of those issues (for this TBB) but let's say that I want to change my drawing register so that it was revision B of this drawing that was included in issue no. 3, instead of revision C - can I do that?

- It is possible but not that straightforward. You can create report using the Create Report command that lists the issue data in it. In this report you will be able to edit the Current Revision for each issue. This is not possible from the Project Revision History report because it uses some complex formulas and formulas are read only in worksheets. I will check if we have a wishlist in our database for this and will add one if not.

 

6 hours ago, line-weight said:

Also, presumably if I "edit" one of these issues, then I edit it for the whole file? Because it doesn't make any sense to edit, for example, the date of an issue, just relating to one TBB. Assuming that's the case it feels wrong that I am able to edit something that applies to multiple TBBs when I've got there from an interface that's about one specific TBB.

- Yes, Issue Data (with the exception of Current Revision) is document wide and edits get applied to all TBBs in the document. Will it be of help if there is some extra text in the edit issue dialog that explains this?

 

Best Regards,

Nikolay Zhelyazkov

[line-weight]

4 hours ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

You can create report using the Create Report command that lists the issue data in it. In this report you will be able to edit the Current Revision for each issue.

 

Is that a report that has a ready-made template somewhere?

 

4 hours ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

- Yes, Issue Data (with the exception of Current Revision) is document wide and edits get applied to all TBBs in the document. Will it be of help if there is some extra text in the edit issue dialog that explains this?

 

Isn't "current revision" part of the "revision data" rather than "issue data"? It's only mentioned in the revision data bit of the dialogue.

 

Yes, I think it would be good to make it clear when editing issue data that you are editing it document wide.

 

But also, I think it could be made clearer what's happening when you delete an issue from a TBB, and you get this dialogue

 

 

 

I find this wording confusing. To me it would make more sense to say something like:

 

"Remove this TBB from the selected issue(s), or remove all TBBs from the selected issue?".

 

or

 

"Remove this TBB from the selected issue(s), or delete the the selected issue entirely?".

 

I realise it might look different from a programming point of view, but from a user's point of view, a TBB is included in an Issue, rather than an Issue being included in a TBB.

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

4 hours ago, line-weight said:

Is that a report that has a ready-made template somewhere?

- No, but it is very easy to create using the Create Report menu command. Here is a quick guide what to select.

4 hours ago, line-weight said:

Isn't "current revision" part of the "revision data" rather than "issue data"? It's only mentioned in the revision data bit of the dialogue.

- Well it is also part of each issue since each issue has to 'remember' somehow which was its current revision.

 

4 hours ago, line-weight said:

But also, I think it could be made clearer what's happening when you delete an issue from a TBB, and you get this dialogue

 

 

 

I find this wording confusing. To me it would make more sense to say something like:

 

"Remove this TBB from the selected issue(s), or remove all TBBs from the selected issue?".

 

or

 

"Remove this TBB from the selected issue(s), or delete the the selected issue entirely?".

 

I realise it might look different from a programming point of view, but from a user's point of view, a TBB is included in an Issue, rather than an Issue being included in a TBB.

-You are right that this written from the programming point. I will raise this for an internal discussion to change it in a more user oriented point of view.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

 

Best Regards,

Nikolay Zhelyazkov

[line-weight]

1 hour ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

- No, but it is very easy to create using the Create Report menu command. Here is a quick guide what to select.

Thanks.

I managed to set up a report with columns like this

 

 

And this sucessfully lists all of my TBBs

 

"Issue-data 1" is the most recent, and "Issue-data 2" is the previous one, is that right? So when I add a new issue, the information in "Issue-data 1" gets copied to "Issue-date 2" and replaced with the new information?

 

Initially I thought it was working ... I could change letter in the "current revision" column for a certain drawing sheet and see that this got updated in the drawing register.

 

But then I started finding that if I changed any letter in that column, every other letter in the column would change to the same thing (ie for every other TBB in the document). Do you know why that might be happening?

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

2 hours ago, line-weight said:

"Issue-data 1" is the most recent, and "Issue-data 2" is the previous one, is that right? So when I add a new issue, the information in "Issue-data 1" gets copied to "Issue-date 2" and replaced with the new information?

- Yes

 

2 hours ago, line-weight said:

But then I started finding that if I changed any letter in that column, every other letter in the column would change to the same thing (ie for every other TBB in the document). Do you know why that might be happening?

- I have just tested this and it is not working like that for me. Which version of Vectorworks are you using?

[line-weight]

3 minutes ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

- Yes

 

- I have just tested this and it is not working like that for me. Which version of Vectorworks are you using?

2023 at the moment.

I'm going to be away from my computer for a few days... But will retest it when I return.

 

When I was experimenting with it, I was trying to see what happened if I entered a revision letter that didn't exist yet, or if I put one in that was out of sequence with the ones before & after. Could that have upset it somehow? I'm not sure it would actually be checking that though.

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

54 minutes ago, line-weight said:

2023 at the moment.

I'm going to be away from my computer for a few days... But will retest it when I return.

 

When I was experimenting with it, I was trying to see what happened if I entered a revision letter that didn't exist yet, or if I put one in that was out of sequence with the ones before & after. Could that have upset it somehow? I'm not sure it would actually be checking that though.

- There was a bug about this that was fixed in VW 2024. There the Current Revision no longer updates in all TBBs.

[line-weight]

@Nikolay Zhelyazkov I am wondering how easy it would be to add this functionality to the modified version of the "Project Revision History" that I use:

 

1. Add a "sheet count" number for each issue. This would count the number of sheets issued, in each issue. This would be very useful to double check withe the PDF document I issue, to check that the number of pages matches.

 

2. For each issue, have any changed drawings automatically highlighted (eg. in bold or with a coloured cell background). So, if issue no.4 has 100 drawings in it, and issue no.5 has the same 100 drawings but only two of them have actually been revised since the last issue, then those two cells would be highlighted to make it easy to identify what's changed between one issue and the next.

 

Are these features that you'd consider adding to the default worksheet ... or would it be a simple matter to tell me how I could modify the one I use?

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

1 hour ago, line-weight said:

1. Add a "sheet count" number for each issue. This would count the number of sheets issued, in each issue. This would be very useful to double check withe the PDF document I issue, to check that the number of pages matches.

- So this will count the number of title blocks that have been issues with this issue? If so, you should be able to use the Count worksheet function, let me know if you need help with it.

 

1 hour ago, line-weight said:

2. For each issue, have any changed drawings automatically highlighted (eg. in bold or with a coloured cell background). So, if issue no.4 has 100 drawings in it, and issue no.5 has the same 100 drawings but only two of them have actually been revised since the last issue, then those two cells would be highlighted to make it easy to identify what's changed between one issue and the next.

- By changed you mean a new revision was included in this title block? If so, isn't the Title Block Project Revision History report giving you this information? As for the color coding, I am not really sure if there was conditional formatting in the worksheets and if it can be done to subrows.

 

1 hour ago, line-weight said:

Are these features that you'd consider adding to the default worksheet ... or would it be a simple matter to tell me how I could modify the one I use?

- The best way to get something considered is to add a well described wishlist item for it and sending me a link to it, just to be sure that I have seen it.

[Pat Stanford]

2 hours ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

As for the color coding, I am not really sure if there was conditional formatting in the worksheets and if it can be done to subrows.

Worksheets, and especially Database Sub-Rows do not currently (July 2024) offer any type of Conditional formatting to change the font/size/style/color/border/fill based on data contained in the drawing.

 

In fact, database sub-rows offer no way to change the formatting at all and every subrow will have the same formatting at the header row.

[line-weight]

2 hours ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

- By changed you mean a new revision was included in this title block? If so, isn't the Title Block Project Revision History report giving you this information? As for the color coding, I am not really sure if there was conditional formatting in the worksheets and if it can be done to subrows.

 

The  image below is an extract from one of my drawing issue sheets - sometimes when there are new revisions of drawings, I just issue the revised ones (for example, drawing issues 6 and 7 that you can see here) but sometimes I re-issue the whole set (for example issues 1, 3, 5 and 8 here), so it will be a mixture of changed and unchanged drawings.

 

When I issue the whole set like that, it can be quite difficult for someone receiving the drawings to spot which ones have been revised. So it would be nice to highlight these. In this case, I've highlighted them manually for issue 8 using red rectangles.

 

This is more of a problem now that drawings are nearly always issued in PDF form rather than on paper.

 

On paper, it would be more common just to issue the revised drawings - they would go off to the contractor and they'd swap them out for the old ones in their paper file. Nowadays, the best way to avoid confusion is often just to reissue the whole lot. Then it's easier for people to have a complete set, all of which they know is up to date.

 

 

 

From @Pat Stanford's reply, it sounds a bit like what I want is not possible, which is a shame.

[line-weight]

2 hours ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

- So this will count the number of title blocks that have been issues with this issue?

 

Yes.

 

2 hours ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

If so, you should be able to use the Count worksheet function, let me know if you need help with it.

 

I'm not that good with worksheet functions - are you able to tell me what formula I should use & where to put it?

Edited July 30 by line-weight

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

15 hours ago, line-weight said:

I'm not that good with worksheet functions - are you able to tell me what formula I should use & where to put it?

- Here is an example that should be entered in a regular spreadsheet cell. Sample 2023 file attached tool:
=COUNT(((R IN ['Title Block Issue Data-3'])))

 

15 hours ago, line-weight said:

 

The  image below is an extract from one of my drawing issue sheets - sometimes when there are new revisions of drawings, I just issue the revised ones (for example, drawing issues 6 and 7 that you can see here) but sometimes I re-issue the whole set (for example issues 1, 3, 5 and 8 here), so it will be a mixture of changed and unchanged drawings.

 

When I issue the whole set like that, it can be quite difficult for someone receiving the drawings to spot which ones have been revised. So it would be nice to highlight these. In this case, I've highlighted them manually for issue 8 using red rectangles.

 

This is more of a problem now that drawings are nearly always issued in PDF form rather than on paper.

 

On paper, it would be more common just to issue the revised drawings - they would go off to the contractor and they'd swap them out for the old ones in their paper file. Nowadays, the best way to avoid confusion is often just to reissue the whole lot. Then it's easier for people to have a complete set, all of which they know is up to date.

 

 

 

From @Pat Stanford's reply, it sounds a bit like what I want is not possible, which is a shame.

- Since you were able to make this in your image I suppose that you did it with a non database worksheet report. For these reports this might be possible, so please, fill in a VE and it will be considered. P.S. for database reports this will not be possible, as @Pat Stanford mentioned.

CountIssueSheetsSample.vwx

[line-weight]

It's basically the "Project revision history" worksheet, supplied by VW, that I use (with some small modifications). So I think that is a database type one?

 

The red rectangles I've drawn, they are just drawn manually on the sheet layer - they aren't part of the worksheet.

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

36 minutes ago, line-weight said:

It's basically the "Project revision history" worksheet, supplied by VW, that I use (with some small modifications). So I think that is a database type one?

 

The red rectangles I've drawn, they are just drawn manually on the sheet layer - they aren't part of the worksheet.

- Well it has a nondatabase format too, but you have to execute the TBManager to update it from there. Not really sure if this was there in VW 2023 though, but I think it should be.

[line-weight]

On 7/31/2024 at 8:11 AM, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

- Here is an example that should be entered in a regular spreadsheet cell. Sample 2023 file attached tool:
=COUNT(((R IN ['Title Block Issue Data-3'])))

I've been rather slow in getting around to trying this ... but have done so just now. Thanks for the sample file.

 

It does work, however the problem is that it doesn't keep in track when I update the worksheet using the TBmanager to add a new issue - because it has to know to shunt all the calculations one column to the right so that the count for "Issue-data-1" is always underneath the most recently added issue.

 

I think the best I can do is have it somewhere off to the side, with formula =COUNT(((R IN ['Title Block Issue Data-1']))) and that will at least give me the sheet count for the most recent issue at any point in time.

Edited August 12 by line-weight

[line-weight]

On 7/31/2024 at 2:35 PM, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

- Well it has a nondatabase format too, but you have to execute the TBManager to update it from there. Not really sure if this was there in VW 2023 though, but I think it should be.

So is it something that's worth submitting a VE for?

[Pat Stanford]

4 minutes ago, line-weight said:

It does work, however the problem is that it doesn't keep in track when I update the worksheet using the TBmanager to add a new issue - because it has to know to shunt all the calculations one column to the right so that the count for "Issue-data-1" is always underneath the most recently added issue.

So how do you want the data to display?

 

Left to Right? Up and Down? Do you want the newest Issue on the left or the right? How many Issues max do you want to display?

 

If you can provide a markup of what you want, it MAY be possible to use some fancier formulas to get what you want.

[line-weight]

2 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

So how do you want the data to display?

 

Left to Right? Up and Down? Do you want the newest Issue on the left or the right? How many Issues max do you want to display?

 

If you can provide a markup of what you want, it MAY be possible to use some fancier formulas to get what you want.

 

Using the sample provided by @Nikolay Zhelyazkov, something like this (highlighted in blue):

 

 

 

 

[Pat Stanford]

So do you want the most recent Issue on the left or on the right?

 

If you put it on the left, then the number of copies will have to be manually shifted over as the data above will change.  If you put is on the right, then the formulas for each sheet will have to change.

 

 

[line-weight]

@Pat Stanford have you picked up that these are not really standard worksheets because they get repopulated by the title block manager?

 

Also "title block issue data-1" refers to the most recent issue not the first issue...so the cell that has that as part of its formula has to be shifted to the left each time a new issue is added, if issues are to run left to right which in my experience is conventional.

[Pat Stanford]

I had not picked up on the Title Block Manager part of the task. If that is a requirement, then there is nothing I can do because the worksheet is created/edited by a script that I don't have access to.

 

I have played with these quite a bit over the years.

 

For a basis of understanding:

 

1. When a Revision or Issue is added to a Title Block Border (TBB), a new record is attached with a name like 'Title Block Issue Data-X' or 'Title Block Revision Data-Y' where X or Y are replaced by an integer.

 

I know for a fact that when a new Revision is added, existing revisions are renamed to Y+1 and the latest Revision has record 'Title Block Revisions Data-1'.

 

I believe the the same is true of Issues, so the most recent Issue will be 'Title Block Issue Data-1'

 

So depending on if you want for Issues left to right to be First to Last or Latest to Earliest will make a big difference in what needs to be done.

 

 

 

[mjm]

On 7/3/2024 at 9:29 PM, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

- Yes, Issue Data (with the exception of Current Revision) is document wide and edits get applied to all TBBs in the document. Will it be of help if there is some extra text in the edit issue dialog that explains this?

↑ Yes please ↑ 

 

& thank you 😃

Edited August 13 by mjm