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SCHEDULE EXPRESSIONS - SOLUTION TO WINDOW WIDTH ISSUE?

Jeff Galbraith
Advocate
As has come up in many previous posts Archicad uses 'Width' for Windows, and 'Length' for Curtain Walls, causing graphical issues in Window Schedules. I was hoping to create an expression based property that returns the value for 'Width' if the object is a window, and 'Length' if the object is a curtain wall. I tried the following but it didn't work:

IF (Length > 0, Length, Width)

Unfortunately it didn't work. Any ideas of how to make this work.
Jeff G

Archicad 27 USA (full), Macbook Pro (16-inch 2023, M3 MAX, 128 GB RAM)
23 REPLIES 23
Jeff Galbraith
Advocate
I appreciate all your help Gerry. That sound like a deal breaker though...as I imagine changing the units in all tables would have unwanted consequences...

What I still don't understand is why the property values get added together for identical items when the property is an expression. The schedule clearly does NOT add together the values that are returned by the basic 'Width' and 'Length' parameters, even with the 'Merge Uniform Item' option checked. It only happens in the column driven by the expression.

I would have expected the schedule to not know the difference, and not discriminate between data returned from the basic property 'Width', and data returned from the exact same element attribute delivered through the use of an expression simply pointing to that very same property.

ie: If 'Width' = 10, and 'Expression (Width)' also = 10...why does the schedule multiply 'Expression (Width)' x 'Quantity', but not 'Width' x Quantity?

Perplexing...
Jeff G

Archicad 27 USA (full), Macbook Pro (16-inch 2023, M3 MAX, 128 GB RAM)
poco2013
Mentor
Schedules are not multiplying quantity times width but simply adding similar (identical) numbers. Probably width and length were actually converted to strings internally so they would not sum.

IOW -- this is a bug -- somebody forgot about expressions and the schedule is quantifying expressions. There are many other instances in which this is desirable. A switch was probably too much trouble for the programmer or someone thought it would be too confusing?
Gerry

Windows 11 - Visual Studio 2022; ArchiCAD 27
Jeff Galbraith
Advocate
There are times when I have wanted to convert decimal numbers into Feet and inches in excel and I have done it with a series of cells and equations that look something like this:

CELL 1: 10.70833 (feet)

CELL 2: 'INT (CELL 1)' returns 10

CELL 3: '(CELL 1 - CELL 2)' returns 0.70833 (decimal feet remand to be converted into inches)

CELL 4: '(CELL 3) x 12' = 8.5

CELL 5 is a string of values from other cells and added text for expression of the units...such as:

( (CELL 2) "feet" (CELL 4) "inches") and returns: 10 feet 8.5 inches

Is it possible to script something like this into the expression editor...potentially using several co-dependent properties..where each cell noted above is a different property?
Jeff G

Archicad 27 USA (full), Macbook Pro (16-inch 2023, M3 MAX, 128 GB RAM)
Jeff Galbraith
Advocate
...sidenote...when a bug is discovered like this, do I report it, or is that something you do as a moderator?
Jeff G

Archicad 27 USA (full), Macbook Pro (16-inch 2023, M3 MAX, 128 GB RAM)
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Jeff wrote:
...sidenote...when a bug is discovered like this, do I report it, or is that something you do as a moderator?
There have been no moderators in this thread... until now 🙂 But, moderators only moderate this forum - delete spam, move posts to proper forums, merger threads, etc. At times, someone from Graphisoft may notice a bug here - but you should always report yourself through your local support.

Cheers,
Karl

PS For the decimal to FFI example, even in Excel there is no need to stretch the conversion across so many cells. One formula will suffice.
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
poco2013
Mentor
Assuming that Calculation units are set in decimal ft -- you could do the conversion and output a string in one expression. AS IN some version of:

TEXTJOIN ( " ", TRUE, STR ( ROUNDDOWN ( {Property:General Parameters/Width} / 1 ft, 0 ), 0 ), "FT", TEXTJOIN ( " ", TRUE, STR ( MOD ( {Property:General Parameters/Width} / 1 ft, 1 ) * 12, 0 ), "in" ) )

However expressions have no way of knowing what the cal units setting is -- if set on something else -- would not work.
Gerry

Windows 11 - Visual Studio 2022; ArchiCAD 27
Barry Kelly
Moderator
The only way to avoid the automatic summation of some fields, is to turn off the schedule option to "Merge Uniform Items", so they all list separately.

Barry.
One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
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Jeff Galbraith
Advocate
And yet the schedule does NOT automatically sum the values of any of the other fields / properties...just the ones that are based on expressions...inconsistent programming.
Jeff G

Archicad 27 USA (full), Macbook Pro (16-inch 2023, M3 MAX, 128 GB RAM)
Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
Jeff wrote:
...sidenote...when a bug is discovered like this, do I report it, or is that something you do as a moderator?

I will report this to GRAPHISOFT so they are aware of it.
Loving Archicad since 1995 - Find Archicad Tips at x.com/laszlonagy
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2x28" (2560x1440), Windows 10 PRO ENG, Ac20-Ac27
Barry Kelly
Moderator
Jeff wrote:
And yet the schedule does NOT automatically sum the values of any of the other fields / properties...just the ones that are based on expressions...inconsistent programming.

Not just expressions.


https://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=69085&p=307003&hilit=schedule#p307003


Barry.
One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
Dell XPS- i7-6700 @ 3.4Ghz, 16GB ram, GeForce GTX 960 (2GB), Windows 10
Lenovo Thinkpad - i7-1270P 2.20 GHz, 32GB RAM, Nvidia T550, Windows 11