Thomas_

So I have some Meyer MM4-XP cabinets with EN3 5-Pin inputs. These are a pain to utilize, so in general I make EN3 to 5 Pin XLR adapters when working with these. I went to draw these in vectorworks using the adapter, but it seems the adapters are only designed to go on the right hand side of equipment or outputs. I inserted an adapter, edited and mirrored it manually, but the moment I connected it to the input of the MM4, it flipped orientation automatically and as a result appeared over the symbol for the MM4. Am I missing something or ddo these not work like I would like yet?

I will say there is possibility to this due to ethernet especially. If you start documenting Network switches, and show protocols being transferred over (As well as VLANs etc.), I could see this being useful, but not quite as simple as one might like. Would take a bit of work to get correct. Thomas

See my first post here, this is my world and I just don't see that being the case, some of them were already offput by the handling of COVID, many of us work with tight incomes so many people wouldn't upgrade every year as a result, often doing anywhere between 3-5 year cycles because of price.

And by the way, would have had me most likely start paying for a second license right then, instead of determining if I need to invest that money elsewhere, so likely to result in MORE income for the product, instead of potentially less. I probably still would have kept my perpetual license and SS in place of course, but this would be easier for me to justify purchasing an additional license for my employees than the current state of things. Yes it feels weird sometimes to realize that charging less can lead to more revenue, but at the smaller end of the scale, in this case it very well might IMO.

So here is my thing, as a small business owner: I currently own one license, and am a service select member at $800 approx a year. This is not a small price, nor was the initial cost of the perpetual license, for me to absorb. It does at least mean that if I ever stop paying I can continue to utilize the existing version. If I was to purchase a second license, which I have been looking at for some time, my annual cost will jump from a one time fee, which I can absorb with a couple of larger jobs, with $800/yr, to $2200+/yr on a monthly license which as a business owner is easier to handle sometimes. That one time fee is $4500 (Spotlight+ConnectCAD) so looking at the difference, in about 3 years this will be costing me an additional $1200/yr to operate a second license, that if I do ever cease payments on, I will lose all access to, instead of just sticking with the current version. I just can't see how that in any way benefits the end user on the small scale certainly. For the larger global business I am also part of that i am considering pitching Vectorworks for, it may not make a huge difference to them, but for the small business it is huge. This is also true for the freelance entertainment professional, many of whom that I work with tend to upgrade licenses when they can afford to, but can't afford to all the time. This is REALLY going to screw them over, just as that industry is starting to recover from being shut down from COVID for such a long period of time, and may drive an entire industry away in my opinion. Personally I hate where industries are going to this model, it is horrible for the end user. This now has me considering instead of purchasing a second license and a second subscription for service select, whether I should instead invest that money into other products, many of which are cheaper than vectorworks to the point of being able to afford multiple just for the difference in cost, much less to say the total investment.

Thank you glad to hear it! This is still good knowledge for me to have though as I do want to learn my way through the vectorworks api to understand the scripting capabilities a bit more though. I would still encourage making everything available via API as much as possible for things, for instance right now I am working on setting up a streamdeck profile with my most commonly used tools, and finding the lack of bindings a bit troublesome for this, but if I could call from an API I might be able to create a single plugin that would allow me to use two key combination bindings (ala emacs, or qcad if you are familiar with that) to expand the available bindings, and allow me to more easily set up those shortcuts possibly by using multi-actions on the streamdeck to emulate the keybindings. All that being said, being able to click once to create a socket that is a Mic input with XLR-F connector on the left hand side (Or an array of them) would go a long way to helping to speed up creating new devices so I look forward to seeing that.

So finally had a moment to look at this while a show is loading out. These is a SetToolwithMode function that seems like it might be related (But maybe not exactly what I want), but I can't tell how to determine the INDEX of the SocketTool (Or the groups, etc. but will get to that after I get the selection working). I did test SetToolWithIndex('SocketTool') and despite returning '1' (aka TRUE) as the bool, it definitely did not select the tool, and I suspect this is a bug that might need to be looked at at some point (The fact it returns TRUE even if it can't actually select the tool that is). SetToolWithName('SocketTool') obviously does work, but SetToolWithMode requires an Index, and I just can't figure out how to determine the index of the ConnectCad tools as they are not listed in the appendix with the rest of the tools. EDIT: I have been trying to utilize vs.ws2 functions to try to get the tool index, but am having problems with tool paths. Based off my reading of the API, I would be able to, for instance: vs.Message(vs.ws2GetToolsCnt('Tool Sets/Schematics')) But that returns 0 which should be the count of tools in that tool set, so obviously I am doing something wrong there. Any hints? If I can understand how to correctly address the tool path, I should (at least in my head) be able to then utilize vs.ws2FindToolIndex() to find the index (Assuming I can figure out what is meant by 'Universal Name' in that function. That in turn would give me the indexes I might be able to pass to the SetToolWithMode command supposedly?

Thank you, will take a look.

Which video are you referring to for 'Nikko's Video'? Ill take a look at using custom records for this, though I will say that if this can be more integrated it would be useful functionality in 'Check Drawings' as well. This is becoming more and more common in the AV world as well as IT to have things PoE as more small devices are coming out that can be so would be useful in the future.

Thank you, will do so.

Answers that, look forward to seeing this working more smoothly in the future as it definitely would have simplified my last set of drawings I was working on tremendously.

So I have had intermittent similar problems, it is not tied to a file for instance, it just happens. One thing I have noticed is that in one occurrence, can't say this for all occurrences, but in one occurrence i was in multi-connect and going to single connect mode made a difference. That being said the problems of the OP still exist for me as well, but wanted to share this just in case it helped anyone else save them from restarting the software on occasion.

Am I missing something or is there no way to specify manufacturer and model on equipment racks? For instance I am currently designing a medium sized IT install, and want to specify the racks to be ordered, but it doesn't look like I can spec the make/model on the rack itself. I can always do so manually, just wondering if I missed something and if I did adding a feature request. Thanks

Another case where this could come into play, when I have a CTP connected to a network switch on either side of the switch (Bi-Directional ports mean L->R reading isn't quite as critical IMO though obviously there is that argument). Again flip Horizontal flips the direction of the arrow and only the arrow, which is great, but doesn't change how the connector itself acts (Coming in from the left side of a red arrow no matter which way it faces will always give a '---' on the cable for the connector)

So I discovered Flip Horizontal on devices in ConnectCAD recently which could be incredibly useful in certain situations to save time on relaying out bidirectional ports on Network devices for instance, however it seems to have an issue (Possibly it wasn't intended to be used like this?) So if I have a simple device symbol in the schematic, USB-C on the left, Ethernet on the right. I right click and tell it to flip horizontal as I need the Ethernet on the left to clean up my drawing, the text for those ports does indeed flip correctly and display correctly. However when I connect a cable to what is now the Ethernet on the Left, the cable reads that it is patched to a USB-C port when connected to that device. Obviously not ideal. Similarly, but possibly less of an issue, is that when double clicking to edit the symbol, it now goes back to the original symbol definition (Which is understandable, though would be nice to edit it as is I suspect, so maybe the flip operation should create a new symbol _flipped or something similar?) So am I used this in a way that shouldn't work and wasn't intended, or is this a bug?