Attributes and Reports
Attributes and Reports, contained in the SpaceDesign add-on for SketchUp, helps you define attributes, create reports on SketchUp components, extend costs and more.
Keywords:
SpaceDesign is an add-on for SketchUp for defining attributes and creating reports from SketchUp components.
- report on Dynamic Component attributes.
- Add your own attributes and report on them.
- Combine and count components with similar attributes.
- Extend cost and other fields (multiply by quantity).
- Total extended cost and other fields.
There are four basic functions:
- Define attributes to be used in editing and reporting
- Edit Attributes for components
- Define which attributes you want to include in your report
- Generate the report.
First Quick Report
After downloading and installing SpaceDesign, follow these steps to try it out.
1. Select "SpaceDesign" from the SketchUp Plugins menu.
2. Add a couple Components to your model (Regular Components or Dynamic Components)
3. Right click on a component, and select "Edit SpaceDesign Attributes"
4. Enter a value for Cost and Description
5. Click the Quick Report icon:
You should see a report like this:
- The image is the current image in your SketchUp drawing.
- I added a second instance of the bench so that you could see how count and extended cost work.
- The text is set on the Text and Fonts tab of the report wizard.
- See: SpaceDesign Report Wizard for more on report formatting.
Next Step - Define Attributes and Report Fields
The Define Attributes dialog will show:
- $area, $curve_length, $count, $comp_desc, $dname, $iname, $layer, $level, $material, $name, $path
- The values for these are determined by the components in your model, and cannot be edited.
- See: Special $ Attributes
- SpaceDesign attributes added to your components.
- Dynamic Component attributes
(These are preceded by DC:. You can report on them, but need to use the Dynamic Component editor to change their values.)
Adding Attributes
You can add additional SpaceDesign attributes using the Add Attribute button.
After entering a name and clicking OK, you the Edit Attribute Dialog will be loaded to make changes.
Edit Attribute Settings
These are available on the attribute spreadsheet, and the Edit Attribute dialog.
- Name - The name for your new attribute
- Header Text - The heading which will appear on reports
- Minimum Width - The minimum width for reports. (in average character size)
- Format - Text, Numeric, Database or Currency. (See Number Formatting )
- Decimals - If Numeric, this is the number of decimal places to use
- Extend From - calculate this field by multiplying another field by the Count field.
- Right Justify -
- Multi Line - attribute text contains carriage returns.
- Blank if Zero - report as blank when values is 0
- Show Total - total this column
- Skip if True - component is not displayed in report if this attribute is true.
- Do not Drill - do not drill into this component when processing sub0-components
- Is a List Box - attribute contains a list of sub attributes. See: List Attributes
- Allow Report - Attribute is used for reporting.
- Allow Viewing - Will be viewed on the Edit dialog, but cannot be changed.
- Allow Editing - View and edit on the Edit Dialog.
- Suppress from Report - attribute is used to calculate other fields for the report, but does not display directly on the report.
- Allow Substitutions - special fields, such as %l% for length, are replaced in attributes. See: Substitutions
- Set on Instance - attribute value is set on the Component Instance. (You can set a default value on the Component Definition). See: Set on Instance
- Calculation String
- Test Calcuation - test the current calculation string
- Add %attribute% to calculation - adds a reference to an existing attribute to the calculation string.
- Calculation String - string to be calculated
- See: SpaceDesign Calculations
- List in Attriubute - this attribute will be listed in the other attribute selected.
- Prev - save changes and navigate to the previous attribute.
- Next - save changes and navigate to the next attribute.
- Apply - save changes and reload. (This is necessary if you change the type to Numeric, and want to test numeric calculations)
Define Report
Select the attributes desired on the report.
In addition to the SpaceDesign attributes on you components, you can include:
- $count - count of components with the same attributes
- $name - the name of the component
- $description - The description stored in the component definition. (Or the Component name if the description is blank)
- $layer - the layer on which the component is placed.
Check boxes
- For each attributes, use the check box to include it in the report.
Report Title
- This is used for the title of the report, and also for the name of the file for the report.
- See: SpaceDesign Report Wizard for the settings on the other tabs
- See: Space Design Report Format to determine the order and appearance of the report columns.
New in Version JI07
- Old Attributes - recognizes and uses attributes from SpaceDesign Free
- skip_if; attribute - component is not processed if this attribute is true.
- Boolean attributes - either true of false
- list_in and list attributes which place several attributes in a single cell of the report.
See: List Attributes .
- Note: The new version contains some features - such as Multi_Line sub-attributes. These are only available in the Pro version.
New in Version JH26
- Database data type for metric values - See: SpaceDesign Number Formatting
- Default Values for attributes - See: Default Values
- Drill into Components and Groups - See: Drill setting
- Substitution strings - See: Substitutions
- Calculations - See: SpaceDesign Calculations
Advanced Techniques
- Calculations - setting attribute values based on size of components, or other attributes.
- Area - report on the area of a face in a component.
- Length - report on the length or curves or edge lines in a component.
- Hyperlink Attributes - attributes containing a WEB URL which will link to that URL from the PDF
- Number Formatting - Database and Currency formatting
- List Attributes - creating a list of attributes and settings.
- Filtering - filtering which attributes to include in report.
- Select Entities by Attribute - search for words, phrases or patterns in attributes.
- Auto Generate Attributes - define and edit attributes in an excel spread sheet.
See also
SpaceDesign: