It would be nice if the drop down list of panels would stay consistant.
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It would be nice if the drop down list of panels would stay consistant.
Margaret Wiggins
Revit MEP 2006 and Greater
Electrical Designer
Detroit, Michigan
wigginsm@yahoo.com
Right now it is based upon whatever panel is closest will be listed first.
It would be nice if it was in alphanumerical order.
Matthew Danowski, PE, LEED AP BD+C
Project Electrical Engineer
Baltimore, MD
Well that is stupid! and is not even consistant with what is closest.
Margaret Wiggins
Revit MEP 2006 and Greater
Electrical Designer
Detroit, Michigan
wigginsm@yahoo.com
So when you are circuiting on the fifth floor you always want to have to scroll through the entire list of 60 panels to get to the ones on the 5th floor that are at the bottom of the list (assuming of course that your panel naming scheme has something to do with the floor that the panel is on)?
You are aware that you can simply pick the panel you want in the view, rather than picking it from the list, right?
R. Robert Bell
Design Technology Manager
Stantec
Opinions expressed are mine alone and do not reflect the views of Stantec.
Margaret Wiggins
Revit MEP 2006 and Greater
Electrical Designer
Detroit, Michigan
wigginsm@yahoo.com
Margaret Wiggins
Revit MEP 2006 and Greater
Electrical Designer
Detroit, Michigan
wigginsm@yahoo.com
OK, I'm hearing a couple different things... It seems that Robert is asking that the focus of the list be on the current Level and Margaret is asking for sorting by level, and then alpha numeric (I think?). A couple questions... What is the current level? Is it the level of the circuit, or the level of the view that you are working in? What does it mean to put the focus of a drop list on a specific "portion" of the list? Does this mean that the current selection should always be near the panels on "that floor" (this will result in inconsistent sorting). I would expect that "most" of the time you are assigning a circuit from "None" to an actual panel, rather than re-assigning panels (this may or may not be the case), should None, be included in the alpha numeric sort? Should it be somewhere else?
We can certainly make the sorting consistent, but the original request was to make the list consistent. If that is what we actually want, then focus wouldn't change and we would need to include panels in the list that aren't applicable to the current circuit (as well as some error messages to indicate that the panel is incorrect for the circuit).
Perhaps we should back up a bit and define the problem before we come up with a solution... My assumption is that the problem you are trying to solve is that it is currently harder than you believe it should be to quickly locate the panel you want while assigning circuits to panels. Perhaps the solution is to allow you to type a key on the keyboard and filter the list based on the keystrokes (i.e. you type 1 and you only see panel names that begin with or include the character 1 in the name). How do you go about selecting a panel for a circuit. Our assumption was that it was based on 1) Being compatible with the circuit (i.e. we filter the list of panels to only those that are compatible) and 2) Based on the distance between the circuited devices and the panel. There are certainly cases where this isn't true (i.e. feeders from MDP through the building, but we saw those as the 10% case rather than the 90% case). Are there other considerations that are more / less important than these. Perhaps the solution shouldn't be a drop list at all, but something else?
jason
Jason,
Let me tell you how we work. Once all of the lighting and power has been layed out the engineer will divide up the building into sections and define which panel to circuit to. Then I will do the circuiting. For lighting I will manually wire the lights together then edit the circuit and select the panel. For power devices I will select the devices I want on one circuit then select the panel. The issue with the drop down is each time I got to select the panel it will appear in the list in a different slot. Not sure what the answer is here to make us all happy.
Margaret Wiggins
Revit MEP 2006 and Greater
Electrical Designer
Detroit, Michigan
wigginsm@yahoo.com
Gotcha - It sounds like you are depending on "muscle memory" to make yourself efficient. (Last time panel 1L8C was the 3rd one on the list, so the expectation is that there is no reason for it to be the 9th one on the list this time).
In the workflow you describe the "decisions" about where the circuits will go really seems to have (at least mostly) been made, and it appears that you are doing the circuiting "en-mass" (assign this circuit, assign this circuit, pan, assign this circuit, assign this circuit, pan...) and with that type workflow the obvious solution would be to "statically" sort the list... Another option in this case might be to allow you to select multiple circuits and assign them all to a panel at once? Or maybe pick a panel and say that every circuit I pick for a while gets assigned to you it...
Anyway, the requirement is now extremely clear. Thank you very much for your help Margaret.