Bill of materials.

Hi there,

On an HND assignment there is a drawing of a Villa in plan view with outer walls, inner walls and then some attributed blocks created for furniture. Once drawn the second task is as follows.

Task 2

Write a report describing the methods you used, with a layout plan inserted into the document and to include a bill of materials extracted from the attribute files.

Can anyone enlighten me as to how you would go about extracting the BOM from the attributes please?

Cheers,

Richard.

There are a couple of different methods available to you. One would be to use the ATTEXT command but this requires the creation of an attribute extraction template file. The other would be a custom lisp routine.

I think I must be doing something wrong here, I'm trying to use the ATTEXT command you recommend so I've followed this to create an attribute extraction template file:

Start Notepad.

You can use any text editor or word processor that can save a text file in ASCII format.

Enter template information in Notepad. Save the file with a .txt file extension.

To extract data about a specific tag, insert the tag name in place of the "numeric" or "character" fields.

Problem is, when I now use ATTEXT and select the blocks I've created it just gives me a blank text file.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Cheers,

Richard.

It could be a number of things, At a guess I would think a problem with the template file, could you post a copy of it

I would if the upload manager would work. Tried adding this 1K txt file 3 times now with no success.

It's jus a txt file called attext.txt with attribute extraction template file in it.

Anything wrong with that?

Cheers,

Richard.

Possibly because you haven't had that many posts up to now, I think you need to have 10 posts before you are allowed to post attachments, here is an example of what it should be looking like. With a name like extract.txt

The first line will output the name of the block and the second line will output the value from an attribute that has the tag "fitting". if you select 3 blocks with the attext command the output file should have 3 lines that give the block name with the value contained in the fitting attribute.

BL:NAME C020000
FITTING C030000

That probably explains why I can't attach the file, does it matter what the file is called as long as it's a txt file and should it have anything in it before the ATTEXT command is used?

This pretty much covers the topic.

http://exchange.autodesk.com/autocadlt/enu/online-help/ACDLT/2012/enu/pages/WS1a9193826455f5ffa23ce210c4a30acaf-6be7.htm

Thanks for all your help, this does seem to be more complicated than I thought it would be. I think an easier way would be to just add text into the drawing directly for a BOM.

Well you could look for a custom lisp routine to do the difficult work for you.

Take a look at Lee Mac's Global Attribute Extractor program.

http://www.lee-mac.com/macatt.html

Thanks for the link, I'm in the pub now but I'll look at that tomorrow...

That probably explains why I can't attach the file, does it matter what the file is called as long as it's a txt file and should it have anything in it before the ATTEXT command is used?

the template file can be called anything.txt and it needs to have the info in it as pointed out above, the output file that you tell the attext command to make is where the information goes to. I must admit it took me a while to get it right. Just putting text in a drawing is OK for half a dozen items, but I promise you, the time it takes to get bored doing that would be better spent learning the layout of the template file.

Possibly because you haven't had that many posts up to now, I think you need to have 10 posts before you are allowed to post attachments

No limit on number of posts for uploading, only limitations are that attachments need moderator approval until more than 10 posts.