Tip No.6: T.O.S. Elevation difference for elements in plan views

When generating general layouts, one can have ProSteel automatically give us the elevation difference between the default elevation of the plan view and any elements that are above or below it. Here we will look at the settings needed for this to work.

It is important to understand that the calculation is made in reference to the elevation of the workframe view (magenta rectangle) used for that particular plan view.

All the controls in order to do this are in the DetailStyle.

We will look at the plan view of this little structure, which has a few internal beams above TOS, some below and some at same TOS as Workframe.

The result will be a plan view like this:

Where only elements with TOS above or below TOS of plan view show their difference value (inside brackets) in reference to TOS of view.

The way this was achieved was using a code inside the DetailStyle. In this case we used the $(N) for the name of the elements, followed by an “exception” rule, meaning that if the code inside this rule is empty (or equal to zero), the whole code inside this rule will be ignored. This makes it so that elements at “good” TOS elevation will not get a 0 (zero) value inside brackets. The exception rule  is the $(X, ????) where the ???? are replaced by whatever code you want to use. In this case we used the $(E) (which is the elevation of the element) inside brackets giving us a final code of:

$(N) $(X, [$(E)])

We could’ve used the following code $(N) $(X, [EL=$(E)]) to get a result like this W200x19.3 [EL=-40]

Now that the code is entered in the text format field, we also need to tell ProSteel to apply it to the elements we want to apply it (we do not want this for the columns in this view).

This is done by going back to the “Object display” page under  “2D Display > Views” and setting the Part name to be using the “Global Format String”