How to Add Door Swing Directions to CNC Labels for Faster Cabinet Assembly

G’day! I’m Clayton, this is the Planit Canada YouTube Channel, and welcome back to another edition of UCSs for Beginners.

This is the second episode in our series, so if you’d like to break the ice with UCSs, be sure to check out our video just here. In our episode today, we are going to tackle a question that we have received multiple times, with some slight variations, on our channel. And that is, “How can we indicate the door opening direction on our labels? Or is there a way for us to indicate the grain match order of the drawer faces?”

If we’ve got a bank of drawers, how can I indicate that this is the first drawer in the series, the second drawer in the series, and the third drawer in the series, instead of whoever’s assembling the cabinet trying to work it out themselves? We might be able to make that process slightly quicker for them.

And we’ll also show you how you can indicate grain match groups. So if you have several cabinets that are part of the same grain matching group themselves, we’ll show you how you can indicate that on the labels. So you see, we’ve got a couple of different things going on. You don’t have to use all these, but we’ll show you how you can take advantage of all of these different tools in the UCS that we write today. So let’s get into it!

Alright, so let’s create a brand new blank UCS that we can start to write in and maybe come up with a bit of a game plan so you can start to understand what’s going on in CABINET VISION and how you can start to make these changes yourself by way of reminder.

Let’s Create the UCS!

If I go to Utilities, User Created Standards, I can open up my UCS library. Now, in this case, we just want a blank UCS. I could copy an existing one, but again, I do think it’s a good idea to catalogue your UCSs by an applicable part, if that makes sense. It might help you or a colleague in the future find this UCS.

So what I’m going to do is click on New so that the CABINET VISION wizard can create this UCS, even if I’m not going to use the code it generates. And under Part, I’m going to change these two objects, and if I click on Door and let’s just click on Modify and then Finish, CABINET VISION will just skip through the rest of those questions and create a UCS for me.

Now, when I click on the Code button at the top here, I can look at the code. Let’s start by looking at what CABINET VISION has given me and explain why we don’t want that. You’ll see here it says, “FOR EACH DOR.” This is referencing a door object that’s been classified as a door. So why don’t we want to do “FOR EACH DOR” object?

In our last video, we did “FOR EACH cab assembly,” and that made sense. We wanted the UCS to work on a cabinet when I click on it. In this case, it might seem like a good idea to create a UCS that’s going to work on our doors or our drawer objects, but I’ll show you why that’s actually not what we want to accomplish with this UCS.

So what I’ll do is just put a semicolon there to make that a note, and we can just save it and click return.

Finding the Right Door/Drawer Object to Include

Now, if I go into a cabinet, for example, and I open up the object tree, what you’ll see is, let’s make a bit more space here. If I start to open up the object tree, let’s go to our face. We’ve got a door opening. You’ll see here is that DOR Door Object that we were referencing in the UCS that CABINET VISION gave us automatically.

The problem is this is not what I’m actually cutting on the CNC or what is going to appear on my labels. See, if I open this up, you’ll see I’ve got, under the door object, several different elements that I can control associated with that door object. So here, the pull is associated with the door object, the hinge is associated with the door object, and I’ve also got the door slab, which is associated with the door object.

The door slab here is the physical part that is going to be cut on the CNC, which means, logically, it is also the part that CABINET VISION generates the labels for. And we can actually go one step further to prove this because I think it’s really useful when we’re trying to write our own UCSs. If I think something is the case, I want to try and prove it.

To prove that this is the part that we’re actually running on the CNC, if I just click return and then go to S2M Center, this is cabinet number two. So I’ll open up that part list, and then let’s sort by cabinet number two. You’ll see the door slab here. These two names reflect what I saw under that part of the object tree, not what I saw under the drawer object or the door object. So this is clearly the part that I want the UCS to interact with.

There are multiple different kinds of doors and door parts as well. So if I just close this job down, from the system level, if I open up the Part Manager just here and then I find my door folder, you’ll see here is that code that I just saw in the object tree, that S_DSLAB code with the description of the door.
Now, if I wanted to change how “door slab” appears on the label, I could make that change here. I could make it something simple like “door.” I can’t say, though, that I want it to be “door left,” for instance, because then all of my doors, regardless of if they open to the left or to the right, will have this as their name. And that’s how they’ll appear on the labels and in S2M Center. So I don’t want that.

So let’s just make this “door slab” for now because, with our UCS, we are going to create a custom description that changes depending on a couple of different factors within our job.

The other important point that we can see from this list is that we might manufacture or fabricate different kinds of doors. So this is just the S_DSLAB code, but I might want my UCS to also change the description dynamically on my door flat panels so that I have a “door flat panel left” and a “door flat panel right,” for instance. Or for my door raised panel, so I’ve got a “door raised panel left” and “door raised panel right.”

The cool thing about a UCS is, with this single UCS, I can create the same condition for multiple different parts at the same time. So if I were you, I would open up my Snipping Tool or just take a screenshot of this list here so that I can now reference this same list in an instant when I reopen my UCS. It just saves me a bit of time going back and forth, or you could equally just write down the names of the types of doors that you would like this UCS to change the description of.

So I’m going to click Return, let’s reopen our job just here, and then go back into that UCS and let’s go to the code.

Redefining the Description of Doors & Drawers

Now, instead of “FOR EACH DOOR,” so that we’re referencing that door object, which we didn’t want to do, let’s have this UCS interact with the particular types of door parts. So the first one was S_DSLAB, and then I’m going to put ” part ” afterwards. So I’m saying to CABINET VISION, in this UCS, I want you to search for all of my S_DSLAB parts.

Now, I might just add here as well whether I am writing this for my doors or my drawers. You might have noticed that CABINET VISION treats both our drawers and our doors as door slab parts, or as the type of door that we might be using. This UCS will also change the description of the drawer parts so that they are called drawers on our labels and in S2M Center instead of being called doors. So we’ll see that soon, but just so you know, it looks like we’re doing this just for doors, but it will be able to work for drawers as well.

So we’ve got “FOR EACH door slab part.” That’s a great start, but we had a list of several different types of doors that we might also want to use in this UCS. And it would be agony if we had to create a brand new UCS for a different part. What we can do is tell CABINET VISION that these same conditions will work for multiple different parts at the same time. And to do that, I use this vertical bar ( | ) symbol here.

Now, I put this in. It’s like I’m almost putting in a comma in English, or an “or” in English, as though I’m saying “FOR EACH door slab or,” and now I can put in the next code. So let’s just grab that list that we had before. Okay, so we’ve got “FOR EACH door slab part,” and I might go “door flat panel,” and then vertical bar, “door raised panel part.” So now this UCS is going to search for all three of these parts if they exist in a project.

So you might want to add more types depending on what you want to accomplish, but this will give you a good idea of what’s possible. Now we can move on to the next line and start creating an IF/THEN condition to start narrowing down CABINET VISION’s search.

Now, this is where it starts to get a bit interesting. There are probably two or three different ways I could write this UCS to indicate the direction that the door opens and also, perhaps, where the drawer face is in the stack. I’m going to look at that option first, and then we’ll add to it and modify it to show you how you can have even more control over the description of that part.

So let’s close this down and go back to our job. Before we start trying to get too fancy, I always like to try and find or check to see if CABINET VISION has a parameter that already does what I would like it to do. Because usually, if I want something done, that means lots of other cabinet makers using CABINET VISION have had the exact same need, and that setting probably already exists somewhere. So I’ve just got to find it.

If I double-click on this second cabinet here, you might see that I actually already have a setting which tells me the direction that a door opens. So you’ll see I’ve got this 1-AL telling me this is the left and 1-AR telling me this is the right. So I know that CABINET VISION somewhere has worked out that this is a left and right door, and all I might need to do is find that parameter that is doing that and add that in the UCS to the description of this part.

So let’s have a crack at that and see if that is going to solve the problem for us. The first thing I need to do is find what on earth this parameter is so that I can add it to the description of the part in the UCS. Go to the object tree, and now let’s start trying to find that parameter.

So if I click on the face, then we’ve got two different door openings here. Let’s go to the first one. None of those settings look right. Let’s go to the door object now. If I double-click on this underscore label string here, you’ll see that I can see the value that CABINET VISION is producing for it, which is the 1-AL. This parameter, _Label, is what we want to add. We’ll be able to get that 1-AL and 1-AR on the labels.

So what I’ll do is make a copy of this, close that down, and if I go to the face plan or end view, I can re-go into the UCS library. So let’s do that. Utilities, UCS, click on Code, and now here I’ve got this parameter that I would like to add to the description of the part.

So I’m just going to put that, make that green with a note for a second, and let’s move now on to our first IF condition. At the moment, I don’t technically need an IF/THEN condition. If I wanted to just redefine this setting globally in CABINET VISION for all of these parts, I could just go to the description, and we’ve got here “text equals,” and now I could define what I want the description of this to be in CABINET VISION.

So let’s say we made this “door” and we want to add in that label. To do that, if I were to just put in “_label” like so, CABINET VISION is going to show me on the label “door _label.” It doesn’t recognize that I want it to pull the value of this setting instead of just giving me the text that I have put between these two apostrophes.

So we have these two symbols here, the curly brackets or the curly braces ( { } ), which, when we put them around a parameter in CABINET VISION, I’m saying instead of just putting exactly what you see, the text that you see, the string of text that you see, the label will instead look like this: it will say “door” and it will call upon whatever value it finds for that part using the label parameter.

So let’s just save this and have a look at what’s going on. I’ll close that, and you’ll see if I open up my object tree now, I can see the name or the description of that part has automatically updated. So I’ve got “door 1-AL,” and if I go to our right-hand door, we’ll have “door 1-AR.”

So that works really well. I have indicated the opening of the door, and the other advantage to this is, let’s say we made these drawers. So I’ll go to my section, let’s do the horizontal multi-split and make these three drawers. You’ll see that I’ve got a 1-A, 1-B, 1-C because these are equally door slab parts. They’re following that same UCS.

If I find that part and drawer object, you’ll see now it’s got the 1-A, and it will also have the 1-B and the 1-C because it is adding that _label after the text that we put at the start. But something you might have noticed is, even though these are drawers, CABINET VISION is following orders. It’s following them strictly. It’s making sure that all of the S_DSLAB parts are called “door plus _label.”

This doesn’t work because I might want my drawers now to say “drawer + _label” instead of following the “door + _label.” So what I can do is go back into that UCS. Go Utilities, User Created Standards, open up the code, and now I’m going to need two IF/THEN statements because I’ve suddenly got two different conditions I want CABINET VISION to work with.

So if I put in an IF/THEN here, and then I want that to be the result, and then END IF. Let’s copy this and paste it underneath. So we’ve got two IF/THEN statements, and in this second one I’m going to make this “drawer + {_label}” like so.

So I’ve got to create an IF statement here that will give me this result on the description of these parts, and an IF statement here that’ll give me this result on the condition of these parts. So now I have to work out, within CABINET VISION, probably using that object tree, what is a setting I could call upon that will basically take CABINET VISION down two different paths to give me two different results.

So let’s have a look in the object tree and try and work that out. Alright, so I’ll just click Save on this, close it down, click Return to go back. That’s okay, we’ll pick that up soon.

So now this UCS, we’re asking CABINET VISION to start sorting its way through the object tree and then start making changes to settings when it gets there. I have to work out what’s that final point is before CABINET VISION goes down the drawer path or the door path.

So I can see in the object tree here I have this drawer object with the DWR, and we saw the door object just before at the start of the video. So what I can say to CABINET VISION is, as you are sorting through all the different branches with this UCS and you’re trying to make sure you get to the right spot, if you recognize that the parent of this door slab, which is this drawer object, is the next branch up, and you recognize that it is called a drawer object, then I want you to change this to be “Drawer slab {_label}.”

Or, if you recognize that this is in fact a door object that is the parent of the S_DSLAB, I want you to make this a “Door {_Label}.” So let’s make a note of this. I might use the Snipping Tool, and I’ll just take that drawer object with the DWR so I can reference that in a second.

Let’s go to the User Created Standards, open up that code. So now I’ve got this description text here. I’m going to copy this and I’m going to click Paste.
Next, when we want to reference a parent of an object in the object tree, the parent is that object that comes beforehand that this object is going to follow by default. I can use this symbol here, this colon symbol here, which is my way of telling CABINET VISION that the parent of these parts, its description is what I’m going to put in here.

So let’s remove this. And I don’t want this to be equal because I’m not defining this part. I’m not saying to CABINET VISION, “I want you to make sure this is the part.” I want to use the two equal signs because I’m asking CABINET VISION to check if these things are identical. So I’m not telling it what it needs to be. I’m asking it to check that these two things are identical.

If the parent description is identical to “door object,” just like we saw in that field there, then I want you to define the description of this part with this condition. Likewise, if I make a copy of this and paste it under this IF/THEN condition, if the parent description is in fact a “drawer object,” then I want you to define the description of the part as the drawer plus underscore label.

So, if I remember correctly, that looks okay. Let’s save this and close this and let’s see if it’s working. So now, in our drawer, I’ve got, great, “Drawer 1-A.” So it recognizes that the parent is called a drawer object, and therefore the name of this S_DSLAB part will be a drawer plus 1-A, or that label that we were using just before.

That does mean that technically, in your CABINET VISION, if this here is called something else- maybe you’ve got some other UCS, or someone’s changed some sort of setting in the past- if you are not seeing “drawer object,” just make sure that what you put between those two apostrophes corresponds to, or is identical to, what you see there.

But this works great. So now, if I go to the section, let’s delete all of these parts, and let’s just make this a pair door through down to that home icon. Make it a pair door; open up the object tree. Now I should be able to see under the door object, and there you go. Cool. So this is calling it a door with the 1-AL.

So our UCS is working so far, but we’re not quite there yet. Why not?

Adding Left & Right to the Description

Well, at the moment, our label is going to show whether or not the door opens to the left or the right as long as I am using this pair door. So if I go to the home here, you’ll see it’s set to pair door. I will see that on the label.

But let’s say I were just to split this into two. At the moment, I’ve right-clicked on that blue section and split vertically. Now I’ve got 1-A and 2-A as the two defining characteristics of the underscore label setting. That means I’m not seeing anymore whether or not the door opens to the left or to the right on my label. What I’m seeing is 1-A and 2-A.

And this is useful to know because it explains how CABINET VISION segments the faces of our cabinets. So, if I go out of this cabinet, I’ve got this other cabinet here I just prepared earlier. What you can see is that when it comes to the face of a cabinet, CABINET VISION is sorting these faces by columns and rows.

Each column is represented by a number, so I’ve got column 1, column 2, column 3, and the rows use the English alphabet. So 1-A, 1-B, 1-C, 1-D. And if I were to, say, split 3-C, I would get 3-C and 3-D. So I would continue to add a different row or a different column depending on how we start splitting up the cabinet.

And this is actually really useful because now, if I were to assemble a complicated cabinet like this, I could see exactly each part’s position on the face of that cabinet. And if these parts had to be grain-matched, then even better, I now know exactly which order they’re supposed to be in.

But what I have lost is the opening direction of the door. So what I’ll show you now is how you can add in manually the door opening direction regardless of whether or not it’s there under the label.

Alright, so now let’s head back to the UCS. I’m going to click on Face, Utilities, User Created Standards, and then Code. And now what we want to do is work out a few more IF/THEN conditions to separate the result. So one that will say “left” and one that will say “right.”

So what I’ll do here is I’ll make a copy of this description and paste it, and on the first one we’ll make this be called “left,” and on the second one we’ll make this “right.” So what I need to do is I’m just going to click on Tab, an IF/THEN condition here that will give me a left result, and then END IF. And then I’m going to need the same to give me a right result. So an IF/THEN condition, and then I need another END IF.

And again, I am using the Tab to give me this little space just so that I can visually see that this IF/THEN condition has an appropriate END IF, that condition is being introduced, and there’s a resolution to it. So I’ve got the IF/THEN here and the IF/THEN here. Great.

So now I need to check in the object tree which parameter represents the direction that a door is going to open so that I can set up these two IF/THEN conditions. So I’ll ask you: what parameter comes to mind? What parameter do you think we could use to indicate the direction?

There are probably a few of you who already know where I’m going with this, but just for the sake of the argument, let’s close this down, click Return. That’s okay; we’ll fix that in a sec. And let’s go to the Help files, Help Topics.

I’m just going to search “left” to see if there are any settings that call upon the left side of the door. Go to System Parameters, and I’m just going to click Control-F on my keyboard and put in here “left.” I’m just going to toggle through Next until I find the right setting that suits me. So this might take a hot minute, so I’ll be back in a second.

So here we go. This is the parameter I was thinking we could use. It’s the HNG parameter. So it specifies the hinging on a door or drawer, and that defines the direction that the door is going to open. So what we want to do is reference this HNG parameter.

And what you can see is we’ve got a few different values that we can call upon. We’ll look at these two now. So we’ve got one equals left, and two equals right. So if I say to CABINET VISION, if you recognize that the HNG equals one, this is the name of the part when you go to cut it and when we print out the labels. Whereas, if you recognize that the hinge is two, then this should be the name of the part, and this should be the name you put on the labels.

So now we’ve got the HNG code here. We need to use the values one and two, so maybe just take a screenshot of that or make a note of it. Or maybe your memory is that good and you don’t need to worry about it.

We’ll minimize those Help files, and now if we go to our Utilities, our User Created Standards, under Code, now I can say, if the hinge, if the HNG is 1, which was our left, then this should be the name of that part. Whereas now, if the HNG equals 2, then this should be the name of the part.

So we’ll give this a go now to see if it’s working. Save changes, click Return. We’ll go into this cabinet, go to our object tree, and I’ll just find that door slab part. Door opening, door object.

Great, so CABINET VISION now recognizes that this is a left door. But whether we’re using a pair door object or not, we’ll still always be able to see the opening direction of our doors on the labels.

If we also wanted to indicate that the hinge opens from the top or from the bottom, then it’s very simple to do. We could just take these lines of code here, copy them, click Control-V to paste, change the hinge now from the value 1 to be value 3 and value 2 to be value 4, and then just make sure that the name we want to use corresponds there, so top and bottom, so that now whichever direction that door is going to open from will be reflected on our labels.

Now, for many of you, this might already be plenty.

Grain Match Group Indicators

We’ve got whether it’s a door or a drawer reflected on the label. We’ve also got the position of this part on the face of the cabinet, so both the column and the row, as well as whether our doors open from the left or from the right. All of that information has been conveyed to the label by just updating the description with a UCS.

But one last thing I wanted to share with you is how we can add the grain match group to these labels. So, for instance, if I were to go back to the elevation, let’s remove these cabinets here, and I’m just going to grab some drawer units. Drawer three, and let’s put together two little groups. One, two, three. One, two.

Presumably, we probably have the grain matching groups turned on to automatic, so I’ll just review that. Under Doors, under this little Grain Match section here, we might have this set up to automatically be grouped as an assembly or auto-group multiple different assemblies together.

However, let’s just do our own groups for this. I’m going to right-click on this one, Create Group, right-click, Add to Group, right-click, Add to Group. That’s our group one. Create group two. I’m going to click on Create Group on the second one and then Add to Group.

So now I can open up that UCS and go to the Code. What we can do is introduce two more IF/THEN conditions, high-level conditions that will essentially say to CABINET VISION: if you recognize that these parts are part of a grain matching group, I want you to use a custom field so I can add a bit more information to deal with the grain matching. If these aren’t part of a grain matching group, I just want you to use these standard descriptions that we have here.

So we’re going to split this into two parts: if it’s not part of a grain matching group, and if it is part of a grain matching group. So now let’s come up here, introduce a new IF/THEN condition, and then add in another END IF here. Now I’ll get rid of this label at the bottom here. We don’t need this. I’m going to copy this and add it at the bottom here, so I’ve got it identical.

And let’s just put in a semicolon and some lines to split this up into these two big conditions. Now, what I’m going to say at the top here is if underscore grain match group is identical to zero, that’s to say it’s not part of a group, then I want you to continue on and do what we’ve been asking CABINET VISION to do already.

However, now in this second section, rather than me writing out every single potential grain match group option — you know, if the grain match group was one, do this; if the grain match group was two, do this; if the grain match group was three, do this — that would be way too many lines of code.

What I can do is say to CABINET VISION, here’s what you need to do if it does not equal zero. If it’s not identical to zero- any other number, any other value- you must follow these instructions. So to do that, we have a particular little short code we use.

So I’m going to put, if the underscore grain match group, I’m going to put an exclamation point and an equal sign. That’s my way of saying “is not identical to zero.” It does not equal zero. If you don’t see a zero under this attribute, under this parameter, then now you will follow these instructions.
And what that means is I could now say, after all the information I’ve already put in, I can put in any custom information I want to add. So I might go “grain match,” and I might use the curly braces, the curly brackets from before, and I can just put in _GMGROUP and finish it off.

And I can just copy this and place this at the end of each of these descriptions, like so, so that now I’ve got two options: one that follows grain matching groups and one that doesn’t.

So we can close this and save it and have a look at the result. So now I’ll be able to see the drawer name, the label, and the GM, which I’ve just put in there to indicate grain matching. Of course, I could put in GMG or whatever I want, and then the grain matching group itself. So if multiple different assemblies have the same grain matching group, that will be reflected on the label of the drawer faces or the doors.

Review

Finally, I’ll just add, once we’ve got a UCS working like this and we’re really happy with the result, look out for your mate and annotate!

Whenever you’re writing your own UCSs, you can help yourself out, help your future self out, or any of your mates, your colleagues, who might have to come in and start working on this UCS in the future for whatever reason. So just run through and add in some notes using the semicolon so that it looks a little bit like this, and you’ll look like an absolute legend.