July 16, 2005

WxH Formula For Windows

In Archtitectural Desktop, doors have special automatic properties that combine the width, height and thickness - or just width and height - into one property so you can display that information in one column of your schedule. Windows, however, do not offer a similar option. Those working with imperial units [feet and inches] may have found that trying to combine width and height properties to which imperial architectural formatting has already been applied in a formula property is not as easy as you might at first think, due to the fact that the symbol for inches is also the delimeter used to represent the extents of strings.

It is possible to create your own W x H formula property for windows, but it will require a little more work that simply combining two pre-formatted strings. I have posted a sample file to the "PSD-Window Size WxH" thread in the Autodesk Architectural Desktop 2005 Discussion Group. This file has a Property Set Definition called WindowObjectsWxH that has two formula properties - one that displays feet, inches and decimal inches and one that displays feet, inches and fractions of an inch, rounded to the nearest eighth of an inch. Each formula uses variables to store the results of the calculations that convert the unformatted inch values into feet, inches and the selected fractional inch option, then puts them all together at the end, using Chr(34) to generate the inch marks.

If you are interested, be certain to get the HxWtest-Imperial_rev1.zip file rather than the first file I posted, as that has corrections and improvements to the feet, inches and decimal inches formula, as noted in the post.

Here is a screen capture of a schedule table that shows the unformatted height and width values for four sample windows, and the way each of the two formulas displays those values.


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