Exporting defined attributes to Excel

[Kenny]

I'm wondering if it's possible to automate a process that I currently do manually. The attached spreadsheet sets out the following information:

Description of housing units
Size of each unit
Number of bedrooms in each unit
Total square footage of each unit
Number of Affordable (social) units
Number of Private (open market) units
Total square footage of each unit
Gross Site Area
Net development Area
Square feet per acre

At the moment I name each housing component with a description, number of bedrooms and square footage. I then have to manually sort through the Outliner to find each component, add them up and input the information into the spreadsheet. If I change the design then I have to manually update it every time. It can be quite laborious and I have to double and triple check to avoid errors.

Does anyone know of an extension that could do this automatically, or if not is it something that could easily be written? The attributes would need to be defined first but if for example the square footage of each unit was input into the definition category of the entity information then I'm hoping that it could then generate something like the example report I've provided.

The icing on the cake is if it could also work the other way where I can select particular units and amounts of each in a spreadsheet and these are populated into a SketchUp file.

---

Example Schedule for automating.xls

[TIG]

So you have Component definition "A Type 1" with a Description like "2:750" for number of beds and sqft.
Provided you are consistent in the format of the description it's simple to extract the number of each component's instances and their beds/sqft from the description...
Although it is possible to right the data to an XLS file, I'd suggest a CSV file with separating commas - it'll open in Excel and you could even OLE that into a formatted XLS...
Here's some cod-code to get your ideas going...

model=Sketchup.active_model
filepath="C;/some...folders/#{model.title}_House_Type_Schedule.csv"
### perhaps the File.dirname(model.path)+"/#{model.title}_House_Type_Schedule.csv"
file=File.open(filepath, "w")
file.puts("House Type Schedule")
file.puts("Type,Number,Beds,sqft,Total")
file.puts("Affordable")
totA=0
totP=0
countA=0
countP=0
names=[]
model.definitions.each{|d|
  next unless d.name =~ /^[AP]/
  names << d.name
}
names.sort!
done=false
names.each{|name|
  if name =~ /^P/ && !done
    file.puts("Private")
    done=true
  end
  d=model.definitions[name]
  len=d.instances.length
  next unless len > 0
  desc=d.description.split(";")
  next unless desc.length==2
  beds,sqft=desc
  total=sqft*len
  file.puts("#{name},#{len},#{beds},#{sqft},#{total}")
  if d.name =~ /^A/
    totA+=total
    countA+=len
  else ### P
    totP+=total
    countP+=len
  end
}
### end totals etc
file.puts("Affordable,#{countA},,,#{totA}")
file.puts("Private,#{countP},,,#{totP}")
file.puts("Total Units,#{countA+countP},,,#{totA+totP}")
###
# Site Areas etc...
###
file.close

I'll leave you to think how to get the site areas and calculate the development ratio etc...

[Kenny]

TIG, Thanks for your reply and code. I pasted it into the Ruby console but I got an error message, although I'm not exactly sure of the procedure. Does each component have to be named in a certain convention for example?

Ideally I'd like to be able to load an extension which then allows me to select the required components (either in the drawing or in the Outliner) and then export the details to a spreadsheet similar to the example I gave. The site area can just be manually input into the spreadsheet as it is less likely to change. The development ratio is calculated by Excel from the number of units and square footage.

I'll PM you.