Getting started with idf-plotter

The idf-plotter project creates an overview of an EnergyPlus IDF file. If you have EnergyPlus installed on your system, you will have a bunch of these files kicking around. Check the ExampleFiles folder of your EnergyPlus installation.

Prerequisites

You will need to install ply:

$ pip install ply

You will also nead to have GraphViz installed and accessible from your %PATH%.

Running idf-plotter the easy way

The easiest way to use the idf-plotter is with the findreferences.bat file.

Example:

C:\idf-plotter\findreferences.bat C:\EnergyPlusV8-4-0\ExampleFiles\gasAbsorptionChillerHeater.idf

This will create a files called output.dot.pdf in the current directory.

Running idf-plotter the hard way

Check the contents of the findreferences.bat file:

python findreferences.py -i %1 > names.txt
python findreferences.py -i %1 -n names.txt > output.dot
dot -Tpdf -O -v -Gsize="10,15!" -Gratio=0.6 -Nfontname=Arial -Nfontsize=12 -Nshape=box -Ktwopi -Goverlap=prism100 output.dot
start output.dot.pdf

As you can see, findreferences.bat calls findreferences.py. Twice. Once without the --names argument and once with. These two calls work slightly different:

• if --names is present, this references a text file containing the list of names to output. Each line of this text file represents an object in the IDF file on a line. The objects are expected to be of the form CLASS;ID and the output contains only the ID portion. You can pass an edited version of the names text file, e.g. to filter out unwanted objects. The output of calling findreferences.py with a --names argument is the DOT graph.
• if -names is not present, the output is a names text file that can be used in a subsequent call, see above.