Writing Object Parameters To Properties

[JaseBee]

Hi Guys,

Switched jobs a few months back and have been demoted to v19, can be frustrating at times, however I've been playing around with the v22 in demo mode ahead of the office possibly jumping up to it.

I have a question about the Properties, they seem much more powerful than 21, allowing you to get real time and useful information from standard archicad elements through the expressions function.

Which is great, however they seem to fall down when it comes to objects, is there any way to map an objects parameters into the properties system?

I think it would be very advantageous for scheduling, being able to combine data points from different element types into the one schedule column.

I briefly looked into the IFC mapping, and found that they've gone one further to hiding it deep within many menus and translator dialog boxes to seemingly remove it entirely (except upon import). But even if you could map the parameters to the IFC it doesn't seem you can map the IFC into the properties.

I Just want stuff to be automagic and all in the one place...

Sigh, any insight would be helpful.
Jase

[Barry Kelly · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately properties and objects just don't talk to each other.
If we could use object parameters in property expressions - that would be brilliant.
It would be another way of getting info from an object without having to amend its GDL script.

Barry.

[JaseBee]

Exactly!

And it would be much more (well a little bit more) transparent to the average user.

See what happens with 23 then I suppose.

Thanks Barry.

[Barry Kelly]

Barry wrote:
Unfortunately properties and objects just don't talk to each other.

Not entirely true it seems.
Properties can not use object parameters (as far as I know), but objects can REQUEST Properties in GDL.
I am still investigating all of this as I am only just starting to play with Properties.

Barry.

[JaseBee]

Yeah I saw that in the GDL reference documentation, and I briefly thought of utilising this to actually control the objects, but the idea is flawed by not being able to communicate the other way. If one properties values were dependant on another, it would fall over.

Then I had another thought of hijacking the profile modifiers to communicate back and forth, but it seems GDL is blind to these new additions... and you could only convey length data, which you could get by with, but the properties interface restricts the expressions you can use when including a profile modifier anyway.

Long and the short of it is, nope, I don't think we'll be able to get object data to properties in this version... maybe in 23?

[JaseBee]

Actually having said that, you could probably build the controls for objects into the properties system. Have the expressions figure out all the values or options or what have you, and then pass the data to an object purely for generation of 2D/3D components...

Though that's getting pretty complicated.

[ML_Arco]

Being able to read a GDL object's parameter values into an expression-based Archicad property would be really great. Eg. doors are such objects that often contain parameters that could be of use for expressions. Since object parameters are possible to list in schedules, seems like this should technically be possible elsewhere too?