I recently got an email from an ArchSmarter reader who needed help automating a tedious task.
He’s a plumbing engineer and he needs to number his pipes sequentially in his projects. This isn’t a big deal if you only have to number a couple dozen pipes.
But he regularly has to number hundreds of pipes. And he does it manually. Ugh. . .
The way he does this now is to create a pipe schedule then filter the schedule by pipe type. He then sorts the schedule by diameter and groups the pipes by length.
The schedule looks like this:
Pipes that have the same diameter and length get grouped together and end up with the same TPI number.
Now, setting up the schedule is the easy part.
Once that’s done, the boring work begins. To number the pipes, our intrepid plumbing engineer manually enters the numbers in the TPI field.
That’s a lot of tedious data entry.
So, he emails me to see if there’s a way to automatically number the pipes.
Turns out there is. You can automatically number the pipes in a few seconds using Dynamo. Sure beats doing it manually!
Now, this method requires some setup and makes use of some advanced list sorting and grouping in Dynamo.
Want to learn how to do it? Check out my step-by-step tutorial below.
You can download the completed graph here. Note you’ll need to have the Clockwork package installed for it to run correctly.
I followed this step by step video and this is my issue. I want to do this same process but I want to sort by my Type, length, RodLength1, RodLength2. Your step by step got me through Type, Length, RodLength1 and then it gets tricky. I repeated the same process the problem is I don’t know how many of my sublist’s I will have. I made it so that I filter to get the Type, then I sort and group by Length, then I account for 30 Sublist’s that need to be sorted and grouped for RodLength1, then of the 30 sublist’s I have to account for another 30 sublists for RodLength2. Once all that is done I can then do a combine of the 900 lists to do that I broke it into 5 lists of 180 items and then did a list clean to get rid of nulls. Since I may only use 10 of the sublist’s from length which means the other 20 are useless. Then of the 10 sublists I used maybe only 5 will be used from RodLength1 which means I have 5 more sublists of 30 that are useless and with that I end up with a lot of my 900 list options being Nulls. To do this I made a custom node out of your sort/group/create list of sublist because dynamo was running very slow this sped things up a little. When I went to finally run the scrip it froze up on me. Any ideas on how I can speed this thing up and make it work?? This script finds one Type and runs it. I need this script to find 7 types and run it.
Jake,
Could you email me your .dyn file? I’ll take a look. My email address is michael at archsmarter dot com.
Michael
great site with very usefula and helpful info