4.4.3 What units are used for numeric values?

All geometric element measurements, e.g. height, area, volume, are metric and based on metres, i.e. any measurement of length is in metres, area in metres squared and volume in metres cubed. So if a wall is drawn 3 feet high (using imperial units), the expression wall.height will yield 0.9144. Any numbers in a calculation are not assumed to be any unit and are read at face value, i.e. no conversion is applied.

Explicit unit conversions can be used if required, so a wall height compared to a figure in imperial units could be written as:

wall.height > 3ft

…or…

wall.height > 3’

Available units include mm, cm, in (“), ft (‘), mm2, cm2, in2, ft2, mm3, cm3, in3, ft3.

Note that Quantities does not make any assumptions about the units of the calculated result based on the data extracted from elements or any numeric values with a unit suffix, and will not apply any conversions based on the unit selected for the target bill item. For example, you would need to multiply a calculated result by 1000 if you wanted to extract a length from ARCHICAD (which is in metres) and attach it to a bill item measured in millimetres.