cartersjohnson

12 minutes ago, Chopsaw said:

Is it %room.height.ceilingfinish% that you are after as a NVP ?

Yes, I am after an NVP for the room height (subfloor to rough ceiling). I have a workaround which is to format %room.ceiling_elevation - room.floor_elevation% and it works fine. I was just trying to understand why I can't retrieve the ceiling height directly.

On 9/26/2021 at 8:48 PM, Chopsaw said:

There are others that could explain better but %room.height.ceiling% is a "Global" macro which is not parsed by Ruby.  It works fine for what it does but there is no way to manipulate that data that I am aware of.  A lot but unfortunately not all of those "Global" macros are also "Ruby" name value pairs that can be looked up and put to good use and formatted the way you need them or used to calculate other values that are not directly available.

I am  just now seeing your response. That answer makes sense to me. For the life of me I can't understand why the relative room heights are not provided as NVPs.

Is there a way to see the code for Chief's default global macros?

I am trying to gain a better understanding of Ruby and macros.

For starters, I understand the principle of %owner.name% (for example, %room.ceiling_elevation%). The owner comes first, followed by a name that will return a value, simple.

However, I have found some default macros that have an owner followed by what seems to be 2 names all separated by periods, such as: %room.height.ceiling%.

To help shed more light on my question, I am working with a custom macro to format ceiling height into feet and inches. My macro works perfectly when I input the first example above, but does not evaluate when I input the second example above. Can somebody help me understand what the difference is between the examples and why the second is immune to formatting?

3 hours ago, Renerabbitt said:

BTW you can create a custom note schedule in plan and let your plan drive your labeling convention and then utilize macros. Just need to send the plan view to layout… I have a video that caught a lot of heat where I build a condoc from plan only, it’s on the forums somewhere, I’ll try and find it tomorrow.

That would be cool. Thank you for all the help!

9 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

You could accomplish it, but would be very cumbersome to setup and not user friendly for any future collaborative work. 
You would simply be making global macros for each page that you could callup in your DIY page table. You would lose the automation of the page label (though you could create smething similar with a complex macro) and would be an awful lot of work for adding or deleting pages. If this was a one-off plan set that you wanted to have a uniform graphical quality to I would understand. I don't see a lot of difference between what you show there however. Easy enough to turn of the Layout page Table heading and make your own, adjust your column widths. Yes you don't have control over kerning or row height sure, but I would encourage all user not to use Rich Text in their plans and layouts anyways. 

I actually just discovered that I can take the table and convert it to Rich Text and format, which could be done at the end of the project with little work. However, I'm interested to know why you don't like Rich Text in plans and layouts?

4 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

Are you using Tools\Layout\Layout Page Table?
Are you entering info on each layout page using Tools\Layout\Edit Page Information\?

 

I know about the Layout Page Table and can use it to provide a sheet index just fine. The problem is I don't like the format of the Layout Page Table, so I would like to create my own using Rich Text box and custom macros. Check out this image which has my new Rich Text Sheet index I'm working on and the default Layout Page Table. I could spend the time each project to fill out the Rich Text box to match the Layout Page Table, but I'd like to automate it so it populates the fields from the Edit Page Information dialog box.

2 minutes ago, Renerabbitt said:

Just curious what other info you are trying to display in your Layout Page Table, as it already has the capability to show everything you just listed?

That's all the information I'm trying to display, but I can't figure out how to display the information for pages 1-XX on sheet 1. The default global macro for the layout info in question will only return that info for the specific page which has the text.

Just as an example... I can't have text on sheet 1 which references the page title from sheet 5. 

I would like to create a custom sheet index for my plan sets (the default schedules are garbage in my opinion) that is able to grab layout page information, such as the label and title. The sheet index would be located on page 1 of my drawings, but be able to pull information from other pages. I'm thinking of having something that looks similar to this:

Sheet Index

A0.1     General Notes

A1.0     Floor Plan

A2.0     Sections

And so on...

The first column is the sheet labels while the second column is the sheet titles. I understand that the Macros typically use a context like "owner object" or "referenced object", but that obviously won't work in this case since the text is neither a label nor able to touch the desired "object". However, I imagine this should be possible as CA has code for their default page schedule.

Are there any Chief Macro gurus out there that know of a function that can return layout page information for any specified sheet? Perhaps would look something like this, 'pagelayout.label()'? Which will take the argument for the sheet number you are wanting the result from?