4.34 How to automatically attach a recipe to elements

Continue from the steps in sections 4.3.1 to 4.3.3. The steps are numbered in the following illustration:

1. Add some walls over 2m high in the floor plan
2. Open the Quantity Take-off Manager by clicking the menu item CI Tools > Quantities > Manage Quantity Take-off and click the Recipes tab. Select the example recipe created earlier and click in the Add When field. We want this recipe to attach to the walls we just added, so the rule should be “any element that is a wall type and higher than 2m”. We could write,

   element.type = “Wall” and element.height > 2

   …but we can simplify this by directly targeting walls:

   wall.height > 2

   By prefixing height with wall instead of element, anything that isn’t a wall is eliminated. Enter this in the field as shown and click OK.

3. Click Calculate again in the Bill of Quantities palette to recalculate the project quantities. The total should now include the both the manually and automatically linked elements:


The result is a total of 3 chairs with the recipe manually attached and 2 walls automatically attached for a total of 5. Note that the automatic attachment rule is ignored when the recipe is manually attached to an element, but it is still possible to attach further rules in this case (refer to section 4.6, Optional Measurements).