Assign room when dropping on plan view - D-Tools Forum

MrDigitronic · 08-02-2007, 11:06 PM

BTW Here is a software suggestion. One of the most time consuming things I found is to assign components to specific rooms. I usally just place one component each on the floor plans and then copy it as needed. Problem is when you run a report and want to run it by location it does not work for obious reasons, and re assigning the components become pretty confusing, specially when you are dealing with multiple stories houses.
Spoke to Blake about it at Cedia/Las Vegas, and apperently at one point there was a way to draw a rectangle that you named for each room and any component you placed inside become automatically assigned to that room.

Is that feature something that might be brought back to the program?
Would be a great time saver!

Posted it somewhere else in the maze forum but never got an answer...

MrDigitronic · 08-10-2007, 05:41 PM

On the horizon or...

RandyB · 08-10-2007, 05:54 PM

This is a suggestion that has come up from time to time and would be really cool. Unfortunately it's fairly difficult to implement, particularly to do it right, which is why it hasn't been included to date. Nonetheless we'll talk it over again and see if now is the time to get it done. Does anyone else have opinions on the relative importance of this? Are there other ways we might make assigning locations easier?

08-10-2007, 08:23 PM

Perhaps assign it when you assign wire length and connections? perhaps have a dropdown of the rooms already assigned in the project right below the wire connections? That would make it easy also when building a project on a floorplan in Visio or CAD...
Just a thought.
Thanks, Bill

MrDigitronic · 08-11-2007, 03:33 PM

What about having a drop down menu that Bill said with all the rooms in the project so you can just highlight all the components in a room by clicking on them and then choose the room.

That should not alter the system type of the component though since for example if you copy a speaker the type is already correct.

I think that if you add components directly from the data matrix and then drag them out one buy one it works alright, but as soon as you start to move things around it just doesn't work anymore and gets confusing really fast.

I for one stopped using the reports that sorts per room for that reason, unless someone has a better idea of doing it that I haven't figure out yet?

avzone · 08-13-2007, 03:33 PM

There are 2 methods that I've always wanted to have the ability to do.

One is to arrange items similar to the way you would with sorting bins. For example, I'd like to be able to open my standard Visio template with a line drawing page that had "sorting frames" and each would have the name of a location. As I drop each item into a location frame, D-Tools would assign it to that location automatically.

The second would be to use the filtering feature. Filter the PDM to a certain location and anything that gets added to the project while in filtered mode would be assigned to that location.

MrDigitronic · 10-09-2007, 11:58 PM

Any news about this feature or is it placed on the back burner?
If any version of the above feature is not happening what is the best way of dealing with this if you doing bigger jobs and you want to be able to quote on based per room?

RandyB · 10-18-2007, 04:40 PM

Originally Posted by MrDigitronic

Any news about this feature or is it placed on the back burner?
If any version of the above feature is not happening what is the best way of dealing with this if you doing bigger jobs and you want to be able to quote on based per room?

This feature is still definitely on the burner. However, it is a bit complex so we'd like to do it right. Can you clarify exactly where and when you'd like to set location? From your initial posting it sounds like you'd like to do it when adding shapes to your plan views. Are you dragging from the PDM or the stencil tree when you do this?

We'll be forming a small focus group for this when the development for this feature really takes off. Contact me at beta@d-tools.com if you'd like be involved.

Best regards,

Randy Bownds
Program Manager
D-Tools, Inc