ODBC Customization

[razorx1858]

Hi Folks,

Here's a good one. I have these standard excel spreadsheets called "Room Criteria Sheets". These sheets are in Excel and usually have room information added to the manually based upon each room's criteria, i.e. paint, floor finish, ceiling finish, etc.

Will Revit allow me to customize the exported ODBC content in a way where the data can automatically be organized to follow the format of such standard documents. I'm not saying it has to follow exactly the same format, but relatively close.

This ability would pay HUGE dividends!

[beegee]

According to Ken Stowe's posts in this topic (www.zoogdesign.com/forums/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=16406#16406) the answer is yes.

Best to contact him to get the details.

[David Conant]

ODBC export creates a very flexible database. You can configure the export to produce a range of file types including .xls and .mdb. Select one usable by the application you are most comfortable working with. When subsequent exports are done, the export engine is intelligent enough to update the database without overwriting other information you have added to the file.

There are 2 possible strategies here.
1. Configure your ODBC export to produce an xls file. Create additional sheets in that excel in the format of your criteria sheets. Link the data fields on the criteria sheets to fields in the export derived sheets. Each time you do another export, Revit will update the export derived data.

2. Configure your ODBC export to produce an MDB file. Open the mdb in MS Access to construct the criteria sheets as reports. Select data from the rooms tables of the database to populate your reports. You can tie in data from other databases as well, if there is a common field to index the connection. Subsequent exports will update all reports.

[steve.clayman]

I would like to create a report in Access that will list the contents of each room in a project. It looks doable since Revit creates a table in the ODBC export called "Room Associations", which list ID's of items found within the room. The difficutly is that it will take fairly sopohicated Access programing to get this information into a usable format. It appears that you will have to link at least 4 tables to get the results of one type. ie.
"Rooms" to "Rooms Associations" to "Furniture" to "Furniture Types". I was hoping someone may have tackled the format of this type of report.

[clog boy]

Everything can be linked, but I don't suppose customized linkage is supported by Autodesk officially.
One example I investigated (but not in-depth) is relation between daylight area and room area. I expect this is very much doable, but I don't have the time (nor the patience) to explore it (yet).

[sfaust]

a little different, but I just went through pulling some cost estimates off using ODBC export to .mdb. All I did was create queries of the database in excel (I don't have or know access). When you create the query in Excel it gives you the option to edit it with Microsoft Query, which will let you select your tables, then just drag parameters on top of each other to create the associations.

It worked pretty well for me and wasn't that hard, and I think the same thing could be done. post again or send me a personal message if you want to try this but need to know more about what I did...

[cphubb]

The easiest way to do this is to create a couple of sub-queries that combine easy linked data. Such as Furniture by Type and then take that query and run it against the room. If you aggregate your data in this manner you can create pretty porwerful queries that can be used over because Revit has pretty consistant data output