Audit Project Room Contents

[DeanUser]

I have created room boundaries and placed room IDs for my project. I did the 'Complete Room Review' process, but since the project has almost 200 spaces in it, I am concerned that I didn't select a few of them to be the ones I really want. Are there any ways, other than going through 'Complete Room Review' again, that I can see what all my room type assignments are before I run Automated Placement?

[forumadmin]

There are a couple of easy ways to perform an audit of your room types, or any other attribute value contents, whenever you desire.

The first way is to make ALL attributes visible temporarily using the 'ATTDISP' command at your command line and then the 'ON' option. You can then use the DraftLogic Electrical Layer Controls to isolate the blocks you are interested in auditing the attributes of to reduce clutter in your view. For example, if I wanted to skim my room assignments, I would turn off all layers except the zDL_ROOM_BDRY layer and perhaps the architect xrefs. If your room names are the standard length there will be a fair amount of clutter in areas with smaller rooms, but this method does give you an easy no-clicks necessary way to skim around the project and check room types. Also very usable for checking receptacle wattage assignments or luminaire code assignments!

Note that the DraftLogic Electrical Annotation Organizer at this time is coded to only affect attributes with a regular state of 'visible'. So it will only rearrange those attributes that are usually visible and will thus not help with much of the clutter that happens when you turn all attributes on. If you desire to temporarily arrange all attributes for better readability, please advise and we will add a work item to our development list to add a 'include visible and invisible' option to the Annotation Organizer.

After you are done with having all the attributes on, you can use 'ATTDISP' with the 'Normal' option to restore the block attributes to their usual on/off states.

The second way of auditing room types used in a project, or the values of any block's attributes for that matter, is to use the AutoCAD Data Extraction tool that was added in AutoCAD 2008 and continues to be provided in all newer versions. You can launch it from the menus: Tools > Data Extraction. This tool allows you to take the attributes of any block or blocks and create a table of the results in your DWG or export to one of several file formats. If you are going to create a file outside AutoCAD, I recommend the 'xls' format instead of the comma delimited since commas in your data will confuse the comma delimited export but not the xls format. Attached is the detail on using it from an AutoCAD blog, my sample .dxe file for extracting a room report from a project, and a sample Excel results file from using that room report .dxe on the demo school.