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Post by cookienz on May 20, 2018 3:59:01 GMT -5
Hi all,
It would be great to have a concatenate function to automatically combine the contents of two columns into a new user column. (Sometimes it's helpful to combine fields for layouts or for ease of formatting on label legends).
The Autoplot tools function 'Copy Field to Field' is a great way of doing this, but the data in the new field is only updated when you run the command. It would be fab to have a selectable function which did this automatically once it was set up, in the same way the 'Universe' & 'DMX#' columns link to the 'Address' column. It would also be helpful to have a user definable prefix/suffix/separator.
Cheers,
Cookie
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Post by strouse on May 20, 2018 16:18:13 GMT -5
I second this 200%!
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Post by johnmcsoft on May 25, 2018 11:58:41 GMT -5
Would you want to be able to edit the contents of this field? That's the hard part... What character do you use to separate the two halves of the data?
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Post by nik on May 29, 2018 11:51:39 GMT -5
I would suggest just using something along the lines of triple curly brackets to indicate a data field inside of a text box. So it would look like this:
{{{Circuit Name}}} - {{{Circuit#}}}
or this:
Clr: {{{Color}}} Gobo: {{{Gobo}}} Acc: {{{Accessory}}}
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Post by johnmcsoft on Jun 6, 2018 12:44:11 GMT -5
That would be like the old-school Filemaker or Microsoft Word way of doing it. Do you want this on the worksheet, or only on printed output? If on the worksheet (and therefore editable), then to edit it gets impossible. For instance, you have "Clr: R-33 Gobo: R77342 Acc: Top Hat" in a single cell on the worksheet. If you mis-type "Acc" or forget the colon after it whatever, then you'd get screwy data. And just clearing the gobo from the entry would require clicking in the middle of the text, selecting the entire Gobo: R77342 part and then deleting it.
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Post by nik on Jun 14, 2018 7:07:52 GMT -5
I would love for it to be available for both. For worksheets perhaps we put the formula in the Column Names and Definitions under Data Type. The main reason for the worksheet is so that I can sync a concatenated field to VW. One of my big frustrations is getting things like Cir Name+Number show up next to each other, aligned to a side, in the right order, regardless of rotation.
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Post by johnmcsoft on Jul 2, 2018 8:49:43 GMT -5
The hard part is when you concatenate two fields and send that data to Vectorworks, how does Lightwright know how to separate the two fields when the data comes back to Lightwright? You'd have to choose a delimiting character (maybe "&") and then be careful about not using that in the text of any field that's being concatenated.
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Post by nik on Jul 3, 2018 15:59:22 GMT -5
Hmm... I'll need to think about that... probably needs to be a Vectorworks based concatenation in that case, maybe the concatenated field is read only in Vectorworks?
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Post by johnmcsoft on Jul 4, 2018 18:32:25 GMT -5
If it's in Vectorworks, it's going to be in Lightwright - in a single field, if that's where it is in Vectorworks....
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Post by JSegalJoyce on Aug 27, 2018 10:47:47 GMT -5
This is something that we have been looking for in LW as well. We use Autoplot solely for this purpose (at the moment) in order to combine 2 color fields in VW. We prefer to keep them separate for layout purposes, but then combine them into a new/user field called "Combined color". We try always to remember to do this before using live exchange so that we don't miss anything, and then need to keep an eye on it once we start editing the LW file. It means that we wind up with 3 different color fields, but we are now able to 'count' color using the combined color data. We use a "+" symbol between the 2 data fields when combining in VW. If there were a way to do this in LW it would cut out a few steps and eliminate one piece of software for us to keep upgrading/updating.
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