In a previous post, I discussed how easy it was to produce a report within Civil 3D. I'd now like to take the opportunity to share with you how to customize those reports for your company and client needs. It is a pretty easy process and there are a couple different tools available to get the job done.
First, understand that Civil 3D reports are pretty generic out of the box. As you can see in the image below, there is nothing distinguishing who created this report and who it was for. It is easy enough to modify a report after-the-fact in a text editing program (as you can see in my previous post), but it would be a lot nicer if the report was already formatted to meet your needs.
The first and most readily-accessible option is to to change the report settings within Civil 3D. Go to the Toolbox tab of the Civil 3D Toolspace and left-click the toolbox icon at the top left representing the Report Settings dialog.
Here you can change all the defaults for company, client, and contact information for a project. These changes will apply to all future Civil 3D reports, so be sure to update the information when working on another project or executing a report for another client.
Select "OK" when you are done editing the settings and run the report you are needing. As you can see below, all the header information in the report has been updated to match what I had entered into the editor.
What happens when you want to make changes to the accuracy of the numbers being reported, though (i.e. number of places to the right of a decimal)? What if you want to run several XML reports or even create many new report templates? That's where the Autodesk LandXML Reporting tool comes into action. It isn't easy to find, but it is a part of your Civil 3D install and should be found within a similar directory.
With the Reporting tool open, you can browse all the formats and locations of the reports currently available. You can import existing reports, edit options, or create new files.
The reports are based from .xsl files which also come as part of your Civil 3D installation. You can see an example of one such .xsl file below. If editing the information in a report isn't enough for you and you want to actually change the format and style of the report, you must do so within these .xsl files.
To edit information in the .xsl files similar to what was done in Civil 3D, go to the Settings tab of the LandXML Reporting application and go through the hierarchy of settings to change the defaults.
Also, note that you can change many other variables aside from just basic naming and titles of reports.
When you have made all the necessary changes to the style and settings of your reports, you can load LandXML files exported from Civil 3D and run reports from the data contained within. Simply "Open Data File" and select the LandXML file, select the report type from the Forms tab, and then the Output tab to preview the results.
The Autodesk LandXML Reporting application is a pretty easy piece of software to use, but most people aren't even aware that it exists. Good luck in your next attempt at customizing your reports, whether they be directly from Civil 3D or within the reporting tool. If you have any further suggestions on ways to utilize the features mentioned in this post, please comment below!
A few issues;
1.) Screen saver initiates, then when re-activating screen, Civil 3D 2012 fatal errors, which then requires a total reboot.
2.) AutoCAD message center error (debug or close), comes up in the middle of a command.
3.) When exiting Civil 3D then re-opening, the dialog box stating it is seeting up the layer environment runs until you do a cntl-alt-del, then it opens, but none of the commands are active....solution, reboot.
Appreciate any help on these matters
Posted by: Bruce F. Schanz | 09/02/2011 at 11:34 AM