annotation cells

Hello,

I understand now the concept of Items, Item types, ... and the reporting of them - thanks to Bentley interaction in this forum!

I think it is indeed an improvement compared with tags in Microstation V8.

Another question now about placing cells and using Items:

I would like to create a group of Item properties and element properties in a specific layout in order to label shapes in my model. I can make that layout, place them in my model and link all text pieces as fields to specific Item properties or element properties of the shape. But for a second shape I have to do this again.

I would like to have a cell with different text pieces in a specific layout and when I place the cell I can link the cell to a shape so that all text pieces (Item properties or element properties) are linked to the chosen shape.

Much like Datagroup Annotation Cells are working in Aecosim.

Is that possible now in plain microstation? Can anyone give me a hint?

Thanks in advance,

Luc Dierick

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  • Paul,

    I looked at labels for this before but I did not find out what the possibilities were. Now I managed to get them to work and it is indeed just doing what I was looking for.

    Just a little question: how can I control which cells are visible in the dropdown when placing a label? Now it seems I see all cells in MS_CELLLIST whereas the documentation states that the labels are to be defined in the dgnlib.

    I tried to add a few cells in the dgnlib by importing models from my cell libraries and I defined MS_DGNLIBLIST but this did not help: I just saw all cells of MS_CELLLIST (a few hundreds of course ....) but I did not see the cells i tried to define in my dgnlib.

    In the documentation I read:

    Labels can be defined in a .dgnlib file that is located at a path defined in the MS_DGNLIBLIST configuration variable.

    Is this working as designed or is it a glitch in the software or in the documentation? Or am I missing something?

    Thanks for all help!

    Luc Dierick

  • Open the cell library dialog “dialog cellmaintenance” and attach the DGNLIB (label definition cells). The Place Label dialog should now list the label definition cells.

    This link has a video on Placel Label.

    Regards,
    Leonard Jones.

  • Do we take it that the lack of of a reference to the second part of Luc's question - ie

    "how can I control which cells are visible in the dropdown when placing a label? "

    means that it is not, in fact, possible to only show the relevant label cells in the Cell Name drop down of the Place Label dialog?
  • Cells are stored in Cell Libraries, not Design Libraries (DGNLIB) so to answer Luc and your question, the list of cells in the pull-down selection for Cell Name in the Place Label would be defined by the configuration variable MS_CELLLIST as he had suggested. It would also list any cells placed in the current design file or you could think that anything listed in the Cell Library dialog should be able to be selected here.

    Regards
    Andrew Bell
    Technical Support
    Bentley Systems

  • so, in short, there is no differentiation between cells which are used for labels, and cells which are used for anything else?

    any cell which is available in the active model will also be available in the label cell selector.

    the result is that, should you have an extensive cell library which is defined by either MS_CELL or MS_CELLLIST, as I do (and it seems that Luc does), then you will need to scroll through that entire library in order to find the relevant label cell.

    if we are following the documentation, it does indeed suggest that labels should be created in a dgnlib. Which of course can be done, but because the only way to access the dgnlib with the label definition in it is to add it to the search path for cells, then the specific label cells are not any different to any other cells.

    this is consistent with how cells would be expected to work. but it seems to me that the shorter answer to my question is:

    no, you cannot specify only cells designed for labels for the label cell selector drop down.

    or am i not understanding something?

    p