Load Combinations - Combination Table Editable Fields

[EduardoMeruvia]

HI

Within Robot's Combinations Table, is it possible to directly edit the 'Combinations Number' column? See figure below;

Combinations Table - Editable Columns

 What I'm trying to achieve with this particular solution, its to be able to set up a spreadsheet with my own combination NUMBERS and corresponding cases and coefficient in a similar format to Robot's Combinations Table which then can be Copy-Paste directly to Robot. 

I'm aware that there are existing Excel macro workbooks that can automatically generate Basic Cases and Combination Cases directly to robot. See link below. 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/robot-structural-analysis-forum/editing-load-cases-in-excel-api/m-p/8...

However, the problem with these macros is that if you have Combination Cases in the order of 200+ it seems to take a long time to generate the combination in Robot.

In my particular case, where I have about 500 combination cases, the macro takes about 3hrs to run and complete generating all combinations in to Robot. It appears this is a common issue among other users (see link above).

In Comparison, if I was to just simply copy-paste the Combination Table directly to Robot for the exact same number of combination or more, it takes just seconds so complete the operation. The only problem with this is that, if you don't have the combination numbers set up then robot will just generate numbers in a sequence starting at the last used Basic Case/Combination Case number.

Any help/Feedback would be much appreciated. 

[Max-88 · Accepted solution]

I would do as follow:

- Excel spreadsheet: define load cases and combinations with numbers to suit + label, name, nature, analysis type

- Robot: Copy and paste in Robot, table Loads, Cases tab

- Excel: In a separate sheet define combinations - Case, Coeff, Case, Coeff etc (reference case numbers from first sheet), however ordered ascending by number. 

- Robot: Copy and paste columns Case, Coeff, Case, Coeff etc into Combination table, Edit tab

See if it works for you. It did for me  🙂

[yesterday55555 · Accepted solution]

You can go to load table, and change it here by this way.

 I think this is the best way at the moment

good luck!

[EduardoMeruvia]

@Max-88 ,

Thank you for your reply! 

Your method does work. I still find the creation of the combination numbers, names and natures through the excel sheet a bit long (about 10-15mins) but its definitely a more manageable time frame. Although, this could just be due to the "long" combination names assigned to my combinations. I tried using short names (smaller string size) for the combinations, and this seemed to improved the time to generate them in Robot slightly. 

Thanks again for the help!

[EduardoMeruvia]

@yesterday55555  

This might be the easiest workaround! Thanks for pointing this out! Didn't even consider checking the basic cases table to see if there was something I could do from there. 

For those interested, my final process to generate 550+ combination in Robot (in less than 5mins), can be broken down in to two steps using just single excel sheet. 

Step 1, Copy/Paste the Combination Numbers/Sequence from custom spreadsheet in to [Loads Tables] within Robot. This will create the Combination Numbers as desired.

Step 2, Copy/Paste the remainder of the require information (combination name, combination type, case and coefficients) from custom spreadsheet in to [Combinations Table] within Robot. This will updated the already created Combination with their respective names, types and coefficients as desired. 

Step 1 and 2 are interchangeable to suit.