This thread is a continuation from this thread where a discussion was raised as to the benefits of Tag Elements vs Text in Cells (either nested cells within parent cell or each text element with a unique identifier such a Colour/Level etc...)
[quote user="Matt Ashby"]
Is there some inherent advantage with using tags? In other words, can you achieve the same results with creating/using a cell that stores the text fields that you would like to change? For example, perhaps you could create a cell called "TitleBlockData". This data only has the text fields, or maybe text nodes that you would want to change from sheet to sheet. Each of the independent text could have a different element color (example: 1, 2, 3, 4....etc.). The purpose of different element colors is that they are unique to the data you want to change. If element color value of 1 represents the sheet number, then in your MVBA code when you scan the file and find a text field you then check its element color, and then depending on the result, you can update the correct data from your Excel file. On the other hand, if you want to skip the use of element color, you could simply have multiple cells (e.g., SheetNumber, SheetTitle, etc.) all found within your master cell called "TitleBlockData". When you enumerate through the master cell, then depending on sub elements you find (e.g., children cells) you can then update them with the corresponding data. Anyway, just food for thought.[/quote]
I think the answer to the question " Can you achieve the same results" would be a yes however (and having not actually done it to prove it) I imagine it requires a fair bit of work to set up. There are some problems I can see:
Using Colour as unique Identifier:
- One of my employers clients has their own specific CAD standards and when it comes to colours they don't use pen tables but work on a WYSIWYG basis. Yes you could use level overrides to overcome the titleblock rainbow but that's an extra setting you would need to ensure is applied in each drawing as it could potentially be turned off by a user.
Using Nested Cells:
- This method has more promise but requires a fair bit to set up. I've yet to enumerate through nested cells so I can't comment on how simple it is to implement in code but its probably not that difficult.
Tags are relatively quick to set up, and you only need 1 No. Cell per paper size type where the titleblock are differs from others. The advantage with using tags is that they can be used with ProjectWise; I doubt the other suggested methods would work with ProjectWise. There appears to be enough evidence on this forum that Bentley changed something under the hood in the SS3 release that was different to SS2 which resulted in macro's others users were using to succesfully read/write tag values in the same version of Excel via ODFFP suddenly not working and having to switch to using ODF instead.
I understand Tags no longer exist in Connect and are replaced with Item Types ( I haven't installed connect yet so I am only going on what I read) and with that being the case I can't imagine they would investigate and 'fix' what was changed as its likely such a trivial issue to them and not worthy of resolution so I guess we just have to live with using ODF is using Tag Elements.