Adding to the Toolbox

If you work for a large organization adding a command to the Toolbox could become burdensome. You wouldn’t want to have to open each machine and manually add a command to the Toolbox. Fortunately the developers of Civil 3D have made it easy to add items to the Toolbox using an XML file.

If you go to C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2011\enu\Data\Toolbox you will find the default location where the Toolbox configuration files are found. The main file is the ToolBoxCfg.xml file. This is the one that gets installed with Civil 3D. If you installed some of the country kits you will also find the ToolBoxCfg_ files. To create my tool category I copied one of the existing files and then modified it using XML Notepad. You can also create the XML file and then go into Civil 3D and use the Toolbox Editor to add tools or categories.

Now create a script to copy the XML to the appropriate computers and location. Civil 3D will recognize the file and automatically add it to the Toolbox.

Don’t have any commands to go into the Toolbox? Well you might want to create some to make yourself more productive. Or I’d be happy to create a tool or two for your organization to make you and your company more productive.

Deleting Corridor Subassembly

Sometimes you want to delete a subassembly from a particular corridor section. While you can do it using from the corridor editor, there is a command that will let you delete them from plan.

Type VECSDELETESUBASSEMBLY at the command line and then select the corridor and then the subassembly you want to delete. How can this come in handy? Well lets say you have a transition from a 2:1 slope to  a 1:1 slope. A corridor section exists between them that is messing up the transition. Using the command you can delete the daylight subassembly from the corridor section providing for transition between them. Alternatively you could overwrite the daylight’s slope to get the same result, although deleting it may be a bit quicker.

XML Reporting

Civil 3D provides reporting methods using both XML Reporting and .NET reports. This post is going to focus on the XML Reporting. XML Reporting lets you export information from a drawing into an XML file which is  then transformed using an XSL file. The first thing you should know about XSL, is that Autodesk views them as example reports as indicated in the warnings contained within the XSL sheets.

“This is a sample report form for generating metes and bounds legal descriptions for parcels.  This report form (stylesheet) is not intended to be a replacement for a trained, experienced professional.  It is intended as a example to make the professional more productive.”

While we can wish Autodesk would put in a report exactly the way we want, it would appear Autodesk’s position is that you the professional should take the example and produce your own report that meets your requirements. So now that we know we need to modify the reports to meet our requirements, how do we do this?

First we need to know where the report files are stored. They are located here: C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2011\enu\Data\Reports\xsl (at least in Windows 7/Vista). Each report has it’s own XSL file. The XSLstands for EXtensible Stylesheet Language and provides the instructions on how the XML file should be transformed into a report. There are XSL editors available, but I haven’t had much luck in using them. Instead I’ve been using Notepad to modify the reports.

The XSL then uses other files contained in the source folder. Each of them does different things. For instance the Conversion_JScript.xsl converts the units from Metric to English or the other way around or changing the unit types (such as feet to miles). Modifying them is as straight forward as modify the text. As the file name indicates the conversion file uses JavaScript to run the report.

The GeneralLegalPhrasings.xml file has the wording used for the legal descriptions. So if you wanted to change the wording in the Parcel reports, you’d modify the wording in this file.

This is just a brief explanation on how to modify the files, I may post more another day.

If you don’t want to modify the reports yourself, I’m available and willing to provide quotes to modify the XML reports to meet your requirements. Just Email me for more information.

An AutoCAD Tip on Tracking

The Super Bowl is this weekend, and that means its bandwagon time. You know bandwagon time right? It’s when the person you’ve known for years suddenly is wearing the logos, extolling the virtues of the team that just one the Super Bowl. Well I’m not rooting for a football team, but I am rooting for a tracking command. Lynn Allen and rkmcswain posted on tracking and I’m jumping on the bandwagon and contributing my own post.

Both of their posts focused on using the TK transparent command to track where you wanted an object to go, I’m going to post about oTrack. oTrack helps you locate where you want something to go based on a point. You can use Polar or the Extension oSnap (and probably more) with it.

In this example I’m going to be moving a vertex from it’s location to a point at the same Y that’s in line with the X value of the point above and to the right of it.

Here’s the command in action. Note that the oSnaps need to be on to get it to work.

Here’s another example with using the extension oSnap.

Have fun Super Bowl Sunday.

AECTOACAD

Matt Kolberg has a post on Civil 3D.com and mentions this command. I suspect as long as proxygraphics is set appropriately you can provide this command to the architect without sending them a new drawing. They can create it themselves.

http://www.civil3d.com/2011/02/compatibility-101-part-2/