How To Add New Report To The Toolbox

Before even start to considering adding and running new reports you need to make sure Internet Explorer is set to be your default browser. If not, you may want to go back to check Justin’s post about browser troubles when running report.

If you are one of those users that knows little more about scripting or simply have some XSL files you have received by somebody who created them for the purpose of reporting, you may need to know how to use them. Also if you have ever compared the settings from another reporting tool called “LandXML Reporter” you may have noticed that not all reports are included into Civil 3D Toolbox tab. Today, I am going to show you how to make reports available for easy use in Civil 3D. Click on the link below to see how.

Let’s say you had your Civil 3D 2010 installed which also installed Land XML Reporter 8. (Check for C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\LandXML Reporting 8).

To get familiar with available reports go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\LandXML Reporting 8 and click on Reporting.exe file to run it.

Now, go ahead and expand all reports in Civil 3D’s Toolbox tab and do a comparison. You will notice that some reports such as “Pipes in CSV” are available in LandXML Reporter and not in the Toolbox. So we’ll just go ahead and add “Pipes in CSV” for instance.

1. Go to Toolbox tab and open Toolbox Editor (second icon on the top)

2. Right-click on Pipes entry and choose New Tool

3. Rename New Tool to Pipes in CSV on the right pane

4. Set Execution Type to XSLT and set Execution File to C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2010\enu\Data\Reports\xsl\PipesCSV.xsl (this path is copied from LandXML Reporter). If you want to be consistent you may put this entry in %ReportDir%\xsl\PipesCSV.xsl . 

 

5. Now you may right-click on Pipes in CSV and choose Execute

6. In the next dialog select File of Type to be XSL and run report

7. Report should show up in Excel spreadsheet

As an alternative to this procedure you may export LandXML file out of your drawing and import the XML file into LandXML Reporter. This would be good enough for one time deal since you would need to export LandXML data out of each file you want to get reports from. That’s why the procedure of adding reports to the Toolbox is, in my opinion, more elegant.

As mentioned earlier, if you know how to create reports using XML, and I’m sure some you you are capable of doing it, you may add it pretty much the same way. You may add this report to the list of reports in Civil 3D and run it from there or export LandXML data out of your drawing and import it into LandXML Reporter 8.

Good luck!