Aaron, what you're experiencing was a requested improvement to how nested work areas behave when selecting a single work area. This was shipped with update 20.43, April 19, 2024. "HotFix: Plant Schedule, selecting a single work area, supports nested areas." Updates Notes Page

This new behaviour was also shown in our Power Tip: Advanced Work Areas, that was sent out with our May 21 Newsletter.

When you select a single work area and that work area contains a nested work area within it, the outer work area schedule will now exclude the contents interior work area.

Work areas decide if a plant is inside them by either the insertion point of a plant block, or the majority vertices of a plant area.

If you'd like an entire schedule, don't use a work area. Just run an entire drawing schedule. You can double click the schedule block to permanently change the title to your desired "Plant Schedule Entire".

This is all based on requests to have the plant schedule work area schedule do the following:
1. Promote documentation best practices where plants are not counted twice in two different schedules.
2. Make it so that individual work area schedules all have the same quantity break downs as when you run an All Work Areas schedule (where it created one schedule but has columns for all work areas).

Amanda,

This makes a lot of sense re: the issue at hand. Thank you for the quality of explanation.

While I understand how this can help more straightforward landscape plans that don't have overlapping areas, for a firm like ours doing huge commercial projects and complicated developments that have many overlapping areas, this is a nightmare. We'll now have to manage our work areas by moving certain ones orthogonally to avoid this nesting behavior. We've had several instances now where the plant schedules have been updated on older plans and someone didn't notice the difference, and not only does this make clients upset but it makes us look unreliable.

Is there any way the development team would consider making the nesting behavior one of two behavior options, the other being the original way they worked? This could be placed in the settings somewhere. We are happy to have a solution at hand, but I think in the long-term having both options would be better for everyone.

Aaron,

The drawing that you attached is a perfect example - the only nesting of work areas that you have, is a unnecessary outer "ENTIRE" work area. You can simply delete this work area, and right click for Entire Drawing instead.

We will certainly ponder continuing to improve the software, but having the quantities line up regardless of option chosen was most important. Looking forward, we do have a dialog box for editing work areas, so that would make the most sense to put some sort of option in that dialog regarding overlapping or nested work areas.

But in the meantime, when you do you have a situation where you need to ignore nested work areas, it should only take a couple minutes to move the work areas into xrefs, to be able to easily toggle them as necessary.

--J

Thanks J,

We decided that we will move the work areas as necessary, as you suggested here. I appreciate your time and all the effort to work with us.

One of our employees suggested that we be able to click which work areas we want included in a schedule, and maybe that's the best way to display the option in the dialog box. It could generate a list of existing work areas, and you can check or uncheck which ones you want to include in a schedule.

Again, thank you, and we're happy we now understand how to approach the schedules to get correct quantities.

PS. As a rule of thumb, our firm doesn't use the "entire" function when generating schedules because there have been "ghost" plants on frozen layers, or "ghost" plants off in model space that were copied by accident, and these can inflate quantities on the schedule without being obvious.

Adam,

Yes, incorporating it into the schedule dialog is another thing we have been pondering, to allow selecting more than one work area. So this is also a possibility. It would also allow modifying the work area assignment from the Edit option of the schedule.

--J

I would also add that this bug exists with the lighting schedule in a similar form, but not in the same context.

If you create an "entire drawing" lighting schedule through "F/X Site, ref notes" every time you regen the light schedule via "regen all" command it adds more light fixture quantities to both the overall drawing qty and the work area qty's, but NOT the individual work area schedules (see attached image). And No I do not have a work area drawn around all the individual work areas similar to what the user (Aaron Cagle) started this thread for and I've also checked the dwg I'm working on for individual blocks out in space that could skew the totals.

Chris,

This is a very different issue.
And it's not for the "Entire drawing" schedule, it is specific to the "All work areas" schedule. It was just a out of scope local variable, hence the quantities would keep increasing every time, but reset after closing and reopening the drawing.
Like all bugs, fixed immediately, we will post an update for this later today.

--J

Quoted from Aaron Cagle on Tuesday, 04 June 2024

Thanks J,

We decided that we will move the work areas as necessary, as you suggested here. I appreciate your time and all the effort to work with us.

One of our employees suggested that we be able to click which work areas we want included in a schedule, and maybe that's the best way to display the option in the dialog box. It could generate a list of existing work areas, and you can check or uncheck which ones you want to include in a schedule.

Again, thank you, and we're happy we now understand how to approach the schedules to get correct quantities.

PS. As a rule of thumb, our firm doesn't use the "entire" function when generating schedules because there have been "ghost" plants on frozen layers, or "ghost" plants off in model space that were copied by accident, and these can inflate quantities on the schedule without being obvious.

I know I'm late the conversation on this, but many months ago we encountered the same issue and I caused us a lot of problem on projects because as a rule we used an "Overall" work area not the "Entire" function. We did this so that random / accidental plants placed "off-site" wouldn't get calculated. This change in a fundament way the software worked took us by surprise and I don't feel was communicated well if at all. We've adapted, but it is still a hassle with "legacy" projects that need to be revised.

Franco, thank you for your perspective on this. We are certainly listening to this type of feedback as we embark on major fixes to a lot of primary features that have been held off for a while.

Our update notes are very descriptive compared to other software, and we put the latest update notes on the homepage of our portal. We made a new Power Tip video of this feature in particular upon launch. We are trying to communicate anything we feel might be disruptive in our newsletter, social media, and home page. Let me know if there's any other avenues you think might be good to add to alert you, as we work out the best way without overloading everything with too much information, creating just another alert that people just tune out.

-Amanda

Like Aaron, we often have work areas within work areas, or intersecting work areas (when working in differing scales). Could it be like when we define drip areas? It allows us to select closed polylines (could be work areas) not to include. So rather than assuming they should be excluded, giving the option to the users? Separating the drawing into separate base drawings seems like a clunky fix to me. But yes. It is a workaround.

That will be two cents please.

We're still trying to figure out a best practice solution for drip areas that cross work areas which happens all the time. Some agencies require that we separate the construction elements in a schedule by sheet. Shrub areas are easy since you can just separate them into two (or more) areas. But we can't do that with drip areas unless we add a useless lateral, pipe transition points and flush valves. Any ideas from the forum users?