Revit ODBC - Room Data Sheets

[tomnewsom]

Has anyone tried this and had success? I'm completely new to databse applications, and it's utterly mysterious to me. I want to set up room data sheets via ODBC (as schedules don't really cut it). We don't have MS Office in the practice, just Openoffice, so Access is out of the question. Help!

[dtownsend]

You can open Access with Open Office. The Access ODBC driver should be built in (it was for me and I don't have Access on my computer). I exported to Access and opened in Open Office Base.

You could also maybe set-up an SQL server and export to SQL and some how get it into Open Office. You can install SQL Server Express 2005 for free. I was able to get Revit to export to an SQL database with SQL Server Express 2005. I am not sure about getting that data into Open Office Base

Maybe there is a way to export directly to an Open Office database file?

[tomnewsom]

Damnit :mad: - Revit crashes when exporting to Access .mdb - and with this project only! I made it work perfectly with a test project

Is this a known issue?

I'm installing SQL SE 2005 as we speak - let's see how we get on with that...

From what I can tell, I should be able to link Room data with Furniture (which 'knows' which room it's in) to get furniture lists on the same datasheets...

[LRaiz]

You do know how to add room parameters to furniture schedule, don't you?

May be you can achieve what you need with regular schedules without resorting to ODBC and loosing the capability of parametric updates.

[tomnewsom]

You do know how to add room parameters to furniture schedule, don't you?

May be you can achieve what you need with regular schedules without resorting to ODBC and loosing the capability of parametric updates.

Well, the format is all room data on one page, so that would require creating, oooh about, 250 individually filtered schedules. No thanks :)

Also, this way anyone in the office can open up the data sheets for printing/reference - we only have 3 revit seats.

[dtownsend]

I'm not sure how this would work, but you could potentially use the API to export to Open Office Base. I'm not sure if Open Office is set-up like MS Office, but if you could use their API with the Revit API you could potential make a link up.

Also with the API if someone wanted to make a change to something out side of Revit it could be done in Open Office and then reimported into Revit. ODBC is a one way street and that couldn't be done - from what I understand.

Just throwing it out

[Steve_Stafford]

Often the question we ask is predicated on how we've decided to satisfy a need. The title of this thread asked for ODBC help while the real problem is creating room data sheets. There have been a few pretty informative examples of room data sheets posted here in the past. Try a search on that subject to see what pops up, here's ONE (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=47623). I changed the thread title to also include the "why".

[tomnewsom]

Often the question we ask is predicated on how we've decided to satisfy a need. The title of this thread asked for ODBC help while the real problem is creating room data sheets. There have been a few pretty informative examples of room data sheets posted here in the past. Try a search on that subject to see what pops up, here's ONE (http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=47623). I changed the thread title to also include the "why".
Yep, that's exactly the way I'm going about it (man, entering all those shared parameters is tedious!) - I just can't get the export process to run smoothly without crashing revit. Works fine on a 'test' project as well :(

[darwinwirawan]

Guys,

Try this way:
1. Create shared parameters, whatever you want.
2. Create a ROOM TAG, this is the trick......

Create all the table - columns and rows - basically the layout that you want to show on your room data sheet.
Put all the room label and text and all shared parameters you required.
As Room Tag only show within the room area, so you have to create invisible lines to cover all room area. Perhaps I can include in a tutorial file next time.

3. Duplicate your floor plan, and use clip box to show only the room you want to use
4. Tag the ROOM TAG that you just made
5. Place it into a drawing sheet
6. Remember you can adjust all the data in shared parameters using Room Schedule as well.

cheers,
dw

[truevis]

Guys,
...2. Create a ROOM TAG, this is the trick......

That's a good trick; but the advantage of using Access or PHP or some other external process is that you can eschew showing parameters that are empty or which don't apply. If there was a way of moving around or turning off labels with some IF logic in a Tag depending on the parameter values, that would work-- but there is no way to do that, AFAIK.

[tucker.138678]

If you load all of the parameters into one label, then empty parameters will not show and the tag will only show parameters with values. See attached image. The only hard part is controlling the graphics to get a clean looking tag. It is possible though.

[21c.lachy]

No I don't know how to add Room to Furniture - More to the point how do you add it to a wall Schedule????

[Scott Womack]

No I don't know how to add Room to Furniture - More to the point how do you add it to a wall Schedule????

To add it to non-system object schedules, when selecting the parameters to include in the schedule, in the lower left corner, there is a pull-down, which normally lists the catagory of item you are scheduling. Pulling it down will show Room (or Space for the MEP folks) then you can select properties of a room object, like Room:Name and Room:Number.

Walls are System families, and although they can define rooms, they themselves are not room "Aware". Thus, in a wall schedule, or any material take-off schedule, there is nothing else that appears when you pull this list down.