CAM Tool Library - table style bulk edit or csv import/export

[rumpelstielz]

i switched to Fusion from Rhino/Rhinocam a little while ago and now that the evaluation period has been great and i'm ready to move all my cam workflow to Fusion i stand before the daunting task of creating a tool library for all my router bits. i have about25 different styles of mills in various sizes and around 85 tools in total.

creating a tool library through the gui in Fusion will take day, just one example of how tedious and unnecessary this is: i have only 6mm shafts on my tools so i always have to change from the default 10mm to , i also only have one holder but for every tool i create i have to reselect this through the gu, for most of my tools i have the same feeds/speed set, again i have to change every field from the defaults to 'my' defaults. it goes on and on and after creating only a dozen of tools i decided to create this thread in the hope i'm not alone banging my head against the wall about this 

and i already have most of my tools dimensions in an excel table which i used to import export my tools for Rhinocam.

so there are two ways this could be really easy to do:

1 - CSV import export .. i tried this by converting the json of the .tool export to csv but there are too many fields to make this workable, it should be implemented so that only the relevant fields are imported/exported. i tried using this: http://konklone.io/json/ to do the conversion but it's complicated.

2 - a table editor similar to the attribute spreadsheet in Maya: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/Maya/fil... like this:

both features shouldn't be too hard to implement but my personal preference would go to option 2, just take the Maya attribute spreadsheet and apply it to the Fusion Tool Library and tool management would be so easy and elegant in Fusion.

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

I'm pretty sure you can already do this.

[rumpelstielz]

thx for this most useful insight Laurens, you mind sharing how you do this ?

[HughesTooling]

Looking in the help it shows you could paste info to and from Excel. But it shows the old tool library so I guess the new and improved one we have now doesn't have this option.

If all your tools have a 6mm shaft, the same holder and feed can you use duplicate tool to speed things up a bit, when you update the tool number make sure you update all 3 fields.

Mark

[rumpelstielz]

hey Mark ... the copy and paste option does not work, that's the first thing i tried and then moved on to trying to brute force the .tool json. Duplicating existing tools helps but only a tiny bit and it's also a tedious workflow.

Since the tools are already in json it shouldn't be too hard to implement an import/export option.

[Anonymous]

It appears to me in the latest version of Fusion that tools are exported to a .tools extension and when opened it has gibberish (some kind of link it appears to tool.json). However, the file itself isn't JSON. A JSON import/export would be handy as you could then just convert the CSV to JSON and then import.

Am I missing an export option somewhere? 

*Update:* After some exploration, I realized that I could change .tools to .zip and unzip on my Mac running El Capitan and it would produce a tools.json file that is readable. I'm hoping that when I zip it back and readd the .tools extension, I'll be able to import. (Will report back.)

*Reporting Back on Import:* So it's slightly more involved, but still faster than remaking a tool via the GUI. So follow the unzip steps above and then duplicate your tool via the duplicate method shown in the image below. You then have to add a unique GUID for the tool. You can generate a bunch of them to pull from via https://www.guidgenerator.com/online-guid-generator.aspx. Just copy and paste and replace the previous tools guid e.g. "guid": "a6fcbd7d-6cf4-4c95-a6d8-5aac0f09bc8f" (in the JSON file). Also, I found that you don't have to replace the guid for the shaft node. Just the main tool node.

After you've finished updating the tools.json file zip it up via compress on Mac. You then have to get info and remove .zip. Otherwise the Fusion will see it as a zip file and ignore it. Make sure the extension is ".tools". You can name the file whatever. 

From what I can tell, here's how JSON nodes align to Fusion GUI parameters. 

Oh yeah, if you need help with JSON editing, here's the first tool that popped up on Google: http://www.jsoneditoronline.org/

[al.whatmough]

This is a valid request.  While it isn't as streamlined as it should be, we  currently have higher priority tasks for the tool library.

I trust the Json editing solution helped you in the short term.

I am setting the status to Future consideration as it is something we need to address in the future.

[Anonymous]

Hello, 

Does anyone have an example import file to add a record?

Thanks in advance!