When I first asked local adt support how they did quantity surcey, they told me they'd calculate it by hand. In the inside I laught and thought, that sure can be done better. Unfortunately this self confidence is gone by now and all that is left is frustration and sheer disappointment.
Every way I came up with lead to the realization, that it can't be done like that, because it was done half-assed by autodesk.
I wanted to do this in NET, but since I'm eager to hear any possible approch.
Major problems I came across so far include:
1) There is this nice net function to get a walls area like this: myWall.Area(Autodesk.Aec.Arch.DatabaseServices.WallSide.Left, True)
However the conditions for this to work are countless. Walls have to be prunged with each other to give correct areas. That won't work in many cases, for example parallel walls, different styles or different heights. Merged walls haven't been implemented at all, and will be ignored. So the result can't be taken serious, not without controlling every single value.
2) Rooms can show information about the connected walls and openings. However they only show this information, it is not possible to access it with NET, at least not under ADT 2008. With some extra steps you can at least get those informations to show up in the extended data, which can be extracted with VBAs PropertySets, yet those are inaccessible for NET (at least I found no way).
So I wonder, has enyone ever tried to get any accurate data from adt plans and succeeded? I'd be glad to hear more about it...
