ChristianB

Hi. I've been a D-Tools user since V3 and are now enjoying SI 5 (soon to be upgraded) with LAN Sync. SI5 is a very time-saving tool that enables me to create project documentation of such quality that our technicians might buy me a bottle of fine cognac for christmas. Anyway; I'm currently working on a project with 99 rooms of AV, 60 of them with Crestron. The overall value of the project is about $4 million and the magnitude of work for documentation and project management is immence. With this type of installation, some regulations from the client is unavoidable. One of the major is that all wire labeling shall be done after NS (Norwegian building standards). This again means that we can't use the standard labelling that is created in D-tools Visio Schematic. An example of label will be:

152-01-002-556-03-001

!52 being buliding number, 01 floor number, 002 room number, 556 is NS for Video equippment, 03 signal type (VGA, Svideo, etc) and 001 is wire number for that room.

If we could get D-tools to label the wires for us as we need it would save us 2-3 weeks of work. Work that we don't get extra paid for. It is no problem to make a dedicated wire manufacturer group for this project if that makes things easier.

Many of the rooms are identical. If we could create one schematic, duplicate as many as we need within the same Visio file and just label them according to the relevant room no, it would make our day.

I've noticed that if you have different rooms in a project and are drawing schematics, the wire label no will start from the highest no from the preceeding schematic, meaning that only one room will get a label with VGA-001. In this big project we will need that all wire no's start at 001 for each room.

Any tips, help, suggestions will be deeply appreciated.

Bakerboy

Bump

ChristianB

Thnx for the bump. I forgot to post the final solution to this case. Thanx to my colleague Jonn who is a d-tools magician, I ended up with the following solution:

First all components and wires was assigned in a normal way (buidling, floor, room, sub-system). After each drawing was finished I marked all components within a subsystem that was related to the active drawing and assigned a Head-end. The head end assign for audio cables and components in room 032, 1st floor would be 02.01.555.032. 555 here is the system no. for audio. Then we used the auto-generated wire labels and Jonn fixed a custom wire label report for me.

The whole project ended up with 62 different Visio schematics, so you can imagine how slow d-tools became as the work progressed.

I met up with Tim and Seth R. at ISE, so the project might me subject to a case study sometimes this year. If I can ever open that project again without feeling nauseous

Bakerboy

Oh good to hear! thanks for the update.