Storey Report

[Neil Barman]

I am wondering if someone here might have a way to report the Storeys within a file (as well as each Storey’s contained Layers, Levels, their heights, etc) when the file ONLY has Stories set up so far? That is, there is no geometry drawn in the file yet, hence I'm not able to report the Storey, layer, level of a any of objects themselves.

 

Thanks!

 

[Pat Stanford]

All of the vectorscript calls to report on stories seem to exist. It should be relatively easy to modify my script that reports on all of the fields in a PIO to report all of the stories in a file.

 

Can you specify exactly what information you want to report on each story and the order you want it reported in?

 

It will be a script that will collect the data and write it into a fixed worksheet. The way it works now is that a new worksheet is created and named to include the date and time each time the script is run. It could be modified to overwrite the existing worksheet data and reuse the same worksheet is you know what you want it named.

[Neil Barman]

Thanks @Pat Stanford!

 

The storey info I am hoping to extract is mainly what is shown in the Stories tab (and related dialogs) of the Organization Window. I'm thinking that this order should work:

 

Highest Storey name & elevation plus prefix/suffix, then that storey's List of all Levels (the ones I have actually used, not the full list) in order from high to low plus the name of Design Layers associated with a Level.

then

Second highest Storey name (with all the info as above)

then

Third highest Storey

and so on, until...

Lowest Storey

 

Something like this...

 

 

[Pat Stanford]

Ah, scope creep. 😉

 

You didn't mention that you wanted them sorted.  But I think we can do that also. Let me see when I can get to this.

 

[Neil Barman]

14 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

Ah, scope creep. 😉

 

LOL... Busted!

 

Yes, the end goal would be to view/print said Report so that a small-and-very-smart team could look at all the Storeys, and their associated heights, and building height limits and such, and plan the project (height-wise) well, before even drawing and objects.  

[Pat Stanford]

@Neil Barman Can you please shoot me a file with some Stories set up in it so I don't have to make a test file.  Thanks.

[Neil Barman]

You bet... Here's one:

Building with Storeys.vwx

 

Thank you!

[Pat Stanford]

@Neil BarmanThis is getting harder. There is not a Vectorscript Call to get the levels associated with a Story. I still need to do more testing, but do you always add levels from Level Templates? Or do you sometimes just manually create levels? I think I have a workaround that will work with templates, but I am not certain if I can get manually created levels or not.

[Neil Barman]

That's interesting about there not being a call to get the Levels of a Storey. Hmm.

 

Realistically, knowing the way templates will be set up and the way users may work "on the fly", it is conceivable that Levels will created both ways; Some Levels will be added from a template and others will be added manually as needed as planning a project.

 

I very much appreciate you digging into this, Pat.

[Pat Stanford]

I may still be able to make it work, I just have not had time to run some tests yet. Perhaps tomorrow.

[Amorphous - Julian]

I’d be very interested in this report too.

[Pat Stanford]

Here is the first draft. Does this look like the right data for the test file you sent?

 

I am assuming you would actually want the Level Ht column sorted from highest to lowest. I think I have an idea on how to do that, but it will take some rework of the script.

 

Also remove the Zero's in the Story Elevation column.

 

Anything else you see that needs to be different?  Recommended Fonts and Font sizes?

 

[Neil Barman]

It's getting there. The layout of the data is looking good so far, but... the data that is being pulled isn't all correct. It seems that the data pulled for the levels themselves is mismatched and in some case not the actual levels used. There appears to be a mismatch with the Layers as well. For example, taking a look at Story-2 in the test file:

 

• Ceiling Level in the worksheet should be 3500, which is a custom Level I made. (2473 is the height of the default.) "Ceiling" should be the Layer noted in the Layer column to the right of it.
• Top of Slab should be 0, and it should have "Slab" in the Layer column to the right. 
• Bottom of Slab (Layerless) should be -500 (also custom) and it should not have a Layer in its Layer column to the right of it.

In contrast, the Finish Floor Level, at 0 height, with its "Floor Layout" Layer is correct.

 

Having the Level, Level Ht and Layer. columns sorted from highest to lowest (with Level Ht. being the governing factor) is the goal, so that the words in the worksheet match how the building would "stack" in real life.

 

Removing the zeros in the Storey Elev column would be ideal, if possible, in order to remove them from being a another piece of data that could be a distraction.

 

Fonts and fonts sizes... As-is they can work, but if it possible:

Row 1: 14pt, Arial, Bold.

Row 2: 14pt, Arial, Bold, Underline.

Row 4 onwards: 12pt Arial

(I wasn't thinking of getting too fancy in terms of the look of the data, but simply having some examples of how formatting can be done would help.)

 

Thanks!

[Pat Stanford]

A few things.  

 

1. Formatting is easy but not worth the effort unless we can make the report work right.

2. The level elevations offsets and associated layers being wrong is probably a bug, but I have not checked yet.

3. It is possible that under the current state of Vectorscript/VW2020 that we can not make a 100% accurate report. Is a mostly accurate report worth anything?  There is no way to query a storey and find out the levels that are associated. What I am doing now is making a list of all of the level types in the file and trying to assign each one to the story. If it succeeds then I assume that that level was not associated and delete it. If is fails, then I am assuming that the level already exists and adding it to the spreadsheet. Unfortunately, the way you add a level is by specifing the name of the level type. In your example above with two levels named Ceiling, I don't have a way to identify them separately.

In order to get the levels in order, I think I am going to have to make a list and sort it by the Elev. Offset. I can then use that to test the levels by name and get the list. But if you have multiple levels with the same name it will always return the one with the lowest offset. I could loop through and look for multiple levels with the same name, and throw up a warning, but I don't see a way to be able to 100% accurately report what you want.

 

Think about it and let me know if that would be good enough before I spend any more time on something that won't be useful.

[Neil Barman]

1. Agreed and because of that, the formatting can stay as is for now.

2. Keep an eye on that of course, and if it does turn out to be a bug, definitely submit it.

3. If a 100% accurate report is not currently possible, then I would say just get it as close as you reasonably can, noting the ways it doesn't work. If a 100% accurate report is possible now, then I could use that on a project, but if a 100% accurate report isn't possible yet we can still use the report you do create as part of a feature request (and the more info we can provide towards that, the better.)

[Amorphous - Julian]

@Pat Stanford @Neil Barman thanks for putting in the effort to create this. 

@Pat Stanford for the 'Ceiling' number. If you deleted the duplicate entry in the story, would it then show the '3500' as specified by Neil?

 

Would you be able to share the report at this currently stage as you have it, so I can run it on one of my projects?

On a separate question regarding stories- if we created a new design layer not using the 'Storeys' dialogue box, and later want to link this design layer back into a storey, is there a way to do so?

[Pat Stanford]

@Amorphous - JulianI would like to spend a little more time to check this and clean it up before I share with anyone. Thanks for the offer.  Send me a project and I will run it and send you the output.

 

Yes, a different sort for this file would work, but only because the ceiling height is higher than the default. In the case where it is lower, then the wrong value will be returned.

 

I think you can add Layers to Levels from the Layer Pane of the Organization Palette. Select the Layer, click the Edit button and then set the Story to associate with  from the Edit Design Layers dialog box.

[Tobias Kern]

Hi Pat,

 

greetings.

 

Found this thread via fortune.

 

Storey Reporting is so much needed in VW.

I can't understand, that this part was not forseen in developing storeys.

 

Storeys must be save some data/information into ifc, or not!?

Is it possible to get ifcstorey data out for worksheets  

 

What you try to achive with the script is great!

 

I'm looking forward to the first iteration of the script.

 

Greetings from Germany

Tobi

[elepp]

Yeah, we would also a have use for a script like that. For now we always draw a schema manually inside a file and print it. If there is an update to the storey heights or levels the drawing is obsolete. 😞

 

 

[Tobias Kern]

Hi elepp,

 

greetings.

 

What i have done so far:

 

1. Made a custom Datastamp (hope this it the right translation) for getting the data of the top of my slabs.

  I draw two different slabs for each storey (the load bearing ones and the not load bearing ones). 

2. Place Datastamp on every important slab in your file. Only one Datastamp for each storey is sufficient.

3. I linked the data of the Datastamps to a worksheet.

4. I have a worksheet which show me the height of my storeys. If i change some storey heights,

   the worksheet (after reload) shows me the corrected heights.

 

The Datastamp and the worksheet show me the height above VW 0,00 and a custom height related to sealevel.

The data of sealevel i have to put in and get later out a custom made database.

 

With this workflow, the only thing i have to do, is a correct placement of my Datastamps.

After that i only have to update my worksheet!

 

Greetings from Germany.

Tobi

[Tobias Kern]

@Pat Stanford

 

Hi Pat and Happy Easter.

 

Are there any innovations with VW 2024 that would be helpful for this topic?

 

Greetings from Germany and thanks for your help

Tobi