Is there anyway to Auto Populate room information

[ggrimes220774]

Is there any way or an easy way to setup my drawing to auto populate room information from a spread sheet or preferably Active Directory?

[clshade]

I'll respond for the bump and because someone will prove me wrong which will be to your advantage.

Programming beyond OOTB CAD will likely be needed. The problem I see is that the spreadsheet will not know one room block from another and therefore not know where to place what.
You are asking for Attribute Extraction in reverse are you not?

[Wanderer]

I'll respond for the bump and because someone will prove me wrong which will be to your advantage.

Programming beyond OOTB CAD will likely be needed. The problem I see is that the spreadsheet will not know one room block from another and therefore not know where to place what.
You are asking for Attribute Extraction in reverse are you not?
I don't disagree with you, this seems like more of a task for a program like Archibus.
But, I do always hate to be a naysayer until one of the experienced programmers has their way.

[ggrimes220774]

I'll respond for the bump and because someone will prove me wrong which will be to your advantage.

Programming beyond OOTB CAD will likely be needed. The problem I see is that the spreadsheet will not know one room block from another and therefore not know where to place what.
You are asking for Attribute Extraction in reverse are you not?
Yes, I want to see if there is a way to populate the room block information (Employee name, Division etc...) using employee information that is stored in Active Directory.

[ggrimes220774]

I don't disagree with you, this seems like more of a task for a program like Archibus.
But, I do always hate to be a naysayer until one of the experienced programmers has their way.
I agree. I have been pulling for us to get Archibus for many reasons. I have not been successful as of yet. In the mean time I was hoping to see if there was a solution using AutoCAD only.

[Wanderer]

I agree. I have been pulling for us to get Archibus for many reasons. I have not been successful as of yet. In the mean time I was hoping to see if there was a solution using AutoCAD only.
~chuckles~ Nice to know that I'm not the only one. But, it looks like, after about 10 years of trying, I finally got preliminary budget approval. The phase with Archibus in it doesn't start until 2014 though. ~heavy sigh~ It was tacked onto another project, or I never would have gotten it this far.

As you can see in the "Facilities Management - In Practice (http://forums.augi.com/forumdisplay.php?f=519)" forum, it seems everyone is using a CAFM program to link to their drawings/models.

I can't see this being a simple enough task that it could be programmed out in-house.
Wish I had some better tips for you, but, I've not seen anything like the functionality you're discussing here in this forum on the autodesk newsgroup.

[Ed Jobe]

I agree. I have been pulling for us to get Archibus for many reasons. I have not been successful as of yet. In the mean time I was hoping to see if there was a solution using AutoCAD only.
I guess that you don't have access to AD either and the ones who do aren't going to be willing/able to do the programming.

[ggrimes220774]

I do have access to AD. We are currently migrating all of our LDAP info into AD so LDAP can go away.

[Ed Jobe]

If you can access the data, then you can get it into the dwg as block attributes. Then I guess the next step would be to decide how much effort you are willing to spend and what compromises you want to make. Because obviously, you're not going to be able to replicate everything Archibus can do. But it shouldn't be too difficult to get something that can update blocks. For example, if you had a standard room tag with attributes for room#, rm name, employee, etc., then when you want to update one, you click on it and a dialog allows you to select the record to use to populate the block. Very basic and manual, but the data will be accurate.

[ggrimes220774]

Thanks Ed, I will give that a try and I will let you know how it worked.

-Jay