I developed a dynamic component to extract feasibility study statistics automatically. Initially, it only extracted general statistics of total area. The areas of individual housing units were extracted manually. However, as the process progressed, I felt the need to automate the statistics per unit due to the complexity of some buildings with many different floors (and consequently, housing units of different dimensions).
However, I noticed that extracting this report is much more complicated than expected using only native tools. I will provide a visual scheme to explain how the component is structured and the difficulty I am having in extracting these reports.
Here is my roadmap:
- Initially, I tried to extract the quantities and information of the units using the native report counting feature (Quantity). However, I realized that there is no way to exclude hidden elements in the count. Since the units are related to the floors and the study in general, these units cannot be excluded without compromising future edits.
- Given that each unit has a dynamic copy property, I created a property to extract the quantity from this information (copies+1). However, when the same floor is repeated several times, this information is not counted (even when concatenated). Summing them up is not an option, as all copies contain the same information about the number of copies, the sum would be incorrect.
- Apparently, I will have to link these statistics to the floors and extract the information from them. However, the component has 10 distinct floor types and each floor supports up to 15 distinct units. I would need to include 150 formulas (yes, I can just copy the formulas, but still, it would be 150 copy/paste operations). It seemed easier to explore other options before doing that.
Here is an example of my latest attempt:
Floor 1 is repeated twice and within them, there are two repetitions of unit 1. This should total 4 unit 1s (or at least, 2 unit 1s concatenated in two floors). However, when extracting the report, I do not get this information correctly.
Since this component had a lot of internal work to be developed, I am not authorized to share it externally beyond screenshots.
Can anyone think of other native possibilities? (As many people in the office use this component, using plugins that add dynamic functionalities would not be a viable option).