September 09, 2006

List Definitions and Multi-Line Room Names

In anticipation of my firm's migration from ADT 2004 to 2007, I was curious as to how we might be best able to take advantage of the addition of an automatic "Name" property for Spaces and the introduction of List Definitions, an expansion of Name Definitions for Areas in previous releases, which now can be applied to Spaces, Zones and/or Manual Properties and can be used to create a predefined list of Names for Spaces.

We currently use a custom room tag based on the out-of-the-box scale-dependent tag, with a second manual property and attribute to support two-line room names, when needed. A formula property combines the contents of the two individual manual properties into one property for use in schedules. You can find a sample file with content similar to what we use in this thread in the Autodesk Architectural Desktop Content Discussion Group. An alternate formula, that can support two, three, or more room name properties/lines, is discussed in this previous article, which contains links to a sample file posted in the ADT Discussion Groups.

Since there is only one "Name" property for Spaces, that would not be compatible with our current methods. I recalled, however, that the Autodesk Knowledge Base for ADT offers another method for creating a two-line room tag that makes use of a single manual property for entering the name and uses MTEXT codes to achieve two or more lines of text. A companion formula property strips out the MTEXT codes for use in a schedule. I just tested this in ADT 2007, with the hope that the List Definition entries could be set up with the MTEXT codes, but it turns out that the backslash character used by the MTEXT codes is not valid.

It looks as though we will have to keep our current set up, possibly adding a List Definition to each of our Manual Properties for room names and remember to train everyone to ignore the Name property on the Design tab of the Properties palette, and keep using our current two Manual Properties on the Extended Data tab.

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