SCHEDULE EXPRESSIONS - SOLUTION TO WINDOW WIDTH ISSUE?

[Jeff Galbraith]

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.

[Minh Nguyen]

Jeff wrote:
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...

Hi Jeff,

First, I hope that you and your loved one are doing well during these challenging times!

Thank you for your question!

Reading through the thread, I guess the question now is why Merge Uniform Items sometimes take the summary of similar items, but sometimes not?

In your particular case, I believe because the Width value has gone through an expression, therefore, schedule has no way of telling Expression(width) is similar to Width. Thus, Merge Uniform Items will add all value from similar items into one cell when activated.

In general, I sometimes don't understand why some parameters get the total, while others get only singular value. Barry showed a great example of that issue: let's say we have 2 identical walls. In Walls schedule, if we activate Merge Uniform Items, the Height parameter is not added up together, whereas Length of Reference Line does, which is hard to understand for me. The same goes for Zone areas and more.

I will ask the developers to see their opinion about this issue!

Thank you very much!

Best regards,
Minh

[Minh Nguyen]

Hi All,

Let me get back to you with some information from the developer. This is a known issue to us, and we are figuring out what would be the best way to address it. Unfortunately, this is not an easy task!

To clarify why we have this issue, allow me to paste his explanation here:

"IES fields have a property, that is hidden from the user. Any field can be extensive, or intensive. This means whether a sum of values have meaning, or not (like temperatures can be summed, but it has no sense). These values are set according to common sense, but sometimes it's not clear to tell.

The user-defined properties are set to intensive, so we won't sum them. BuiltIn Areas and Volumes are extensive, when merging, we sum them.

Lengths are mixed, the wall height is intensive, but the length is extensive"

Therefore, setting datatype for expressions to length would make Expression(Width) to be summed together when Merge Uniform Items is activated, unfortunately.

I hope this will answer your question. I truly apologize for the inconvenience that it is causing!

Have a nice day!

Best regards,
Minh

[Laszlo Nagy]

Thanks Minh for this explanation. I personally always love to hear such pieces of info, gives a greater understanding of the program.

About the issue at hand: we could work around this by creating a new Expression-defined Property, which would have a "String" type. Then we could convert those Length-type values (that are summed) and convert them to string, add the unit of measurement, and use that in the Schedule. That way we would get the exact data and visual representation, and it would not be summed.

[Pink Projects]

Bumping this up—any progress on a fix?