Short FAQ about ePlan Scripts

ePlan scripts can be very useful when we want to achieve higher efficiency and better quality in project designing processes.

Every project workflow consists of a lot of different tasks, many of them are repetitive, time-consuming and error prone. A basic example of that is exporting of the project into a pdf, or an archive of the whole project or a combination of booth, which is often required when you want or need to have a backup version of the project related to the created pdf document.

In the later case the workflow may consists of several steps, like:

1. Refresh the reports
2. Compress the project
3. Export the pdf document
4. Export the entire project
5. Rename the exported pdf file (for example, add the current date to the file name)
6. Rename the exported ezw (ePlan) project export file
7. Move the exported file into the proper destination folder.

So what it seems a simple task is now divided in seven different steps which are time-consuming and prone to errors.

What ePlan scripts enable us to do is to automate this kind of procedures and thus be more efficient by sparing time and getting higher reliability by cancelling the human factor.

What ePlan scripts allow us to do?

1. Read and save one or multiple project settings
2. Add menu items with custom functionalities
3. Create interactive forms
4. Automate project files management
5. Automate project maintenance and project data export procedures
6. Other…

What do we need in order to use ePlan scripts?

To create ePlan scripts we need the following:

1. The proper licence (if you are not sure about it, contact ePlan support or your reseller.)
2. Microsoft Visual Studio (the free version should be good enough)
3. Basic knowledge of C# or VisualBasic

Are there any available resources?

I relied my work on two resources:

1. Suplanus.de is a very good age dedicated to ePlan scripting, it is in German, but with a bit of help from Google Translate it can turn out very helpful.
2. ePlan help

Is ePlan scripting hard?

It depends on the foreknowledge of programming you have. For me the learning curve was quite steep, although I had some programming experience from before.

Lack of accessible resources is not helpful either.

Having some direct experience with C# programming and/or C#/VisualBasic scripting for MS Office will be helpful to anyone working with ePlan scripts, but it is not a must.

ePlan Scripts vs. Automated processing?

ePlan automation can be also achieved by using the Automated processing dialogue, which can be found in: Utilities > Automated processing.

Although it can be quite useful for simple tasks, it is somehow limited as we can use only ePlan Actions with available options. On the other hand the Automated processing dialog is, simple to use as no programming knowledge is needed.

Final words about ePlan scripting

I find ePlan script as a very useful tool in terms of automating my workflow. It is true I invested few days of my time in figuring out the proper way of creating scripts and another bunch of days for creating the script itself, but …

I am satisfied with the investment of time I have done. The created ePlan script saves me from a bunch of annoying but necessary tasks and gives me the assurance everything was done properly, just by doing one single click.