Doors & Zones - Losing hope

[Anonymous]

In an effort to simplify and route out our reliance on 3rd party objects I have made our own doors and a system for scheduling.

The system works and it is simple enough to get juniors to do it.
Simply, doors are modeled in 3d including frames and the corresponding 2d fragment(s) drawn. These are saved as non-placeable door types and then called up from our own 'master door' which contains all the scheduling data.

That much works great - and I'm not worried about frames matching wall thicknesses as the details cover this (although it might be an area for future development) - it means also that our door types drawings are pretty much done.

One problem remains which is the numbering of the doors and is due to the unpredictable zone allocation of the door. This is a problem because I am using the door ID and zone as the door number.

We need to be able to control which zone the door belongs to beyond relying on swing direction (not that currently this makes any difference).

I have tried putting a dynamic hotspot on the door master to shift the c of g but this has no effect.

There are no overlapping zones on visible or invisible layers.

Using the dynamic hotspot technique on the actual door label works just fine but alas we can not schedule the labels. (label reads door ID and zone number comes from label c of g)

I have a manual override in the door master in which I can enter in a custom zone number but this is not BIM.

Any ideas and help greatly appreciated.

[Anonymous]

Actually, it looks like I can schedule the labels by scheduling the doors and then selecting the label parameters via 'additional parameters'.
So now my labels read the schedule parameters from the door master and the zone is associated to the label.
And I've added a dynamic hotspot to the label so that it can be located outside of the actual zone but the centre of gravity be in the right place for correct reading.
Trying it out today.
I'll update this post later.

[Anonymous]

Since I'm kind of used to talking to myself I'll update this story.

Yes you can access your custom label or door marker parameters from you door schedule.

BUT the zone number parameter that my schedule reads is NOT reliable. This has cost me many late hours trying to figure out why and now I have pushed the time line as far as it will go for this task.

I case anyone asks:

• The label or marker (i have tried both) always shows correctly in plan.
  There are no overlapping zones or zones on hidden layers.
  Manually moving each label (tweaking) sometimes gives the right zone in the schedule but then after a group tweak many (70%) are set to some random zone number.
  I can not see a pattern to the random zone number the schedule chooses.

I have elected to (sniff) manually enter in Zone numbers for my 300 odd doors.

This is not BIM.

Still Angry

[Anonymous]

Anyone? ...Anyone? ...Bueller?

On an 'up' note - because I have my own master door which calls all the 'door types' adding scheduling categories is easy and is done to one door object not 40.
Also, I can do super useful things like draw a bright red box around all the doors with access control (when glob_scale = 1:101) or similar for fire rated doors - no more backwards and forwards between the schedule with a highlighter and printed plan etc.

Still the label/zone/door thing - way too hard and should work simply. The fact that i have had to re-enter zone numbers manually when they are right there in the model for referencing (i.e. do it twice) is just plain bad.

It also has opened up the possibility for errors if some other team member changes the zone number without manually updating the door's zone number. (They have been reminded not to do this in a convincing manner)

Still Angry (but liking the flexibility and control of having our own doors)

[Brian Spears]

Argh! I was hoping to find an answer to why the door is reading the zone number from the zone into which the door swings. It seems that it should be able to read the zone indicated as the "non-exterior" side of the wall when first clicking to place the door in the wall.

[Da3dalus]

This is an old topic, but just to make sure it is closed for anyone that stumbles across it…

For the last several versions of ArchiCAD (at least since 16), you can specify which zone on which side of the door defines the door ID. Under the Door Settings > Parameters, look for Parameters for Listing > Door Belongs to the Zone into which it Opens. This is either checked or unchecked. It is not related to the "outside" of the door as defined by initial placement.

Please note that when you schedule such doors with the Zone and ID as identifiers, these fields show up separately. They have to be 2 columns in your schedule.

[Brian Spears]

Da3dalus wrote:


For the last several versions of ArchiCAD (at least since 16), you can specify which zone on which side of the door defines the door ID. Under the Door Settings > Parameters, look for Parameters for Listing > Door Belongs to the Zone into which it Opens. This is either checked or unchecked. It is not related to the "outside" of the door as defined by initial placement.

Please note that when you schedule such doors with the Zone and ID as identifiers, these fields show up separately. They have to be 2 columns in your schedule.

Thanks Da3dalus! Since posting this back in May, I've stumbled across that checkbox (acutally, I think Yanni Alexakis showed it to me when he was here at our office a while back).

Next, the work to convince old-timers to accept the two columns in the schedule...and the two lines of the Door Marker...

[Da3dalus]

The 2-column issue is a pain, but I got everyone in our firm to accept it. The only place where we have issues is when we use a hardware consultant. They want the schedule in Excel, and they use the composite door/zone numbers to generate their hardware schedules. In that case, I have a routine, after exporting to Excel, to combine the fields:

1. Insert a new Column A;
2. Assuming the first 2 columns are Zone and ID, use the equation in A1 =concatenate(B1,C1) or =concatenate(B1,"-",C1) depending on your format;
3. Fill Down Column A the length of the schedule;
4. Select the new values in Column A and Copy (Cmd-C);
5. Without de-selecting, right-click and Paste Special, and select only Values (this gets rid of the equation and makes it regular text);
6. Hide or delete columns B and C.

I hope this makes someone's day!

[Brian Spears]

Da3dalus wrote:
I hope this makes someone's day!

Of course! Concatenate has come in handy a few times before, so I'll bookmark this to hopefully not forget it when I need it! Thanks!

[matjashka]

Gentlemen, if I understand the 2-column problem correctly, it can be resolved with *ANY* AC door if you use a custom marker. Works for me and my "live" schedules. I did this to successfully eliminate having to put anything in Excel of PDF.

Let me know if you want me to elaborate... I don't remember exactly how I did this, but here's a quick-and-dirty result (see attachment). Is this what we're talking about...? This is all BIM-based, every single field is part of the door+marker parameter combination.

EDIT: oh, of course, the door ID here is actually a combination of zone number and door ID, not just manual door ID, just to be clear.