DigiPara Blog

Adding a Sheet Constant with translations

Normally in Liftdesigner you can add Sheet Constants depending on rules. You can combine this feature with a translation message to create a constant that has translations. This can be extremely useful for drawing title blocks.

In the example we will see how we can do this for a constant called "PistonSide" that shows where the piston is positioned in the shaft.

First create appropriate LD  Drawing Messages and translations for each piston position. In our example this is rear, left and right.

Then create 3 sheet constants that correspond to the 3 sides. Name all 3 of them "PistonSide". This can be done since only one constant will be true each time, depending on the piston position.

 

   

In the SHCSTITEM_RULE column, put LDS("") & "External$(""MSGGRP3200.MSG00"")", changing the numbers to correspond with your drawing message. Then in the SHCSTITEM_CONDITION, use the piston side LD("Shaft0.Car.Frame.WALL")=2 as a rule for the constant.

To use this constant in a dwg title block, we must remember that constants are stored in Sheet.Storage. and the title block is a viewframe in a sheet. However, since we never know in advance the sheet index, you have to reference the constant in a relative way.

The sheet is the parent of the viewframe, so we use Me.Parent. to reference it. To use the constant we created, use this reference External$("Me.Parent.Storage.PistonSide")

This way you can have only one title block for every piston position and every language. The same trick can be applied to the counterweight side for traction elevators.

 

 

Figuring profile group parameters out

We recently had the question, how to figure out how a specific profile group parameter is calculated. Even most of the parameters having names and are self explaining, some parameters are more tricky. This is in particular if the parameter has just the native name like P2 or P17.
 
 
In that case the LIFTdeveloper.chm is a good resource for profile group parameters. It is usually installed at
C:\Program Files\DigiPara\LD50\Help
 

 
The documentation for the parameters are NOT located under the components, instead you have to navigate to the table that contains the "..._PG_GRP" variable. 
The documentation shows a piece of the source code that calculates the parameters. Probably there might be a German explanation and also not everythging is self explaining. By the way, this list is almost complete since it is generated from the last source code stream.
 

 
Please let me know if you have any comments on that.
Andreas