Workflow: Creating devices from a worksheet

[CharlesD]

A few things jump out at me as sticking points for this workflow:

 

Documentation on worksheet

First the small issue: As I've dug into this, I think there is no situation where a user would want to create devices from a CC auto generated worksheet report (i.e. All Layers Device Report. Let me know if I am incorrect. Assuming I am correct, I think users who come to VWX strictly for CC will have a learning curve with this, and it's not immediately apparent. There should be one or two sentences added to this page of the help files that more explicitly tells users that they should be updating this from a custom worksheet they make, or a CC "List".

 

Symbol selected on creation

Right now if I customize the visual look of a device in CC and hit "Save Device..." it creates a symbol inside of the project file. However when running "Create devices from a worksheet" the device that is created is based on the active settings for the Device Builder tool. If I have an instance of the customized device on my schematic already I can transfer device properties using the Device Tool > Pickup / Apply Attributes commands. These feels like an unnecessary step to me. If my project contains only one instance of a symbol for a device, then the "Creating Devices from Worksheet..." command should apply that symbol to the device without me having to transfer attributes.

Error Checking
When running "Creating Devices from Worksheet..." on a worksheet that has an error, the check field is populated and the cell is highlighted in yellow. If you fix the error (ex. missing Make) and re-run "Creating Devices from Worksheet..." on that worksheet the Check field is nulled, however the cell background color remains yellow. I would prefer that this is restored to its previous color.

Device Mapping
I am assuming this is a bug, but when I accept a Device Mapping suggestion for an inaccurate worksheet (in this case, missing Make) the selected device is not added to the schematic, and the row receives an error in the Check field as skipped. This seems like it should not work this way?

Command completion
When running "Creating Devices from Worksheet..." on a valid worksheet the command completes without intervention by the user. Any newly created devices are inserted into the schematic and selected. This is slick, it allows me to know where and how many devices were added. However, if you run "Creating Devices from Worksheet..." on a worksheet and all those devices are already present in the schematic, the user receives zero indication of what happened. The command just finishes. This could be improved by displaying a pop up like "All devices already present on this layer, there was nothing to add." or something like that.

[Conrad Preen]

Dear @CharlesD

 

Thank you very much for taking the time to write up  these detailed comments. Let me just quickly tackle these one-by-one:

 

1) Documentation: yes indeed - I have passed this on to Tech Pubs to consider.

 

2) Symbol creation: again yes - in fact I remember thinking about this possibility but at the time it was more important to keep focus. I like the idea and it's an enhancement that I will certainly consider.

 

3) Error checking: yeah we discussed that in our team. I kinda agree but then I don't. To be absolutely perfect we'd have to first restore the cell background colors to a saved state if one exists before the command and save the state, then run the command and highlight the errors. So far so good. Then you start thinking what to do if the user happens to have already set the background color to the one we are using for highlighting? And about these saved colors - do they persist in the file or just for the session? And a simple visual aid starts to spiral out of control... Maybe the best thing is to set the cell backgrounds back to white when we run the command? What do you think?

 

4) Device Mapping: we will look into that. Thanks for the report!

 

5) Command completion: Nice idea. I'll consider that too as an enhancement.

 

Best regards

 

Conrad

[Nikolay Zhelyazkov]

Hello all,

 

About this one:

45 minutes ago, Conrad Preen said:

3) Error checking: yeah we discussed that in our team. I kinda agree but then I don't. To be absolutely perfect we'd have to first restore the cell background colors to a saved state if one exists before the command and save the state, then run the command and highlight the errors. So far so good. Then you start thinking what to do if the user happens to have already set the background color to the one we are using for highlighting? And about these saved colors - do they persist in the file or just for the session? And a simple visual aid starts to spiral out of control... Maybe the best thing is to set the cell backgrounds back to white when we run the command? What do you think?

- I do not completely agree to set the color to white or whatever else, because this means that every time the command is run and there are no errors the cells will get colored in that particular color. What if the worksheet was colored with some fancy colors by the user? I suppose that we can only change the color to white if it was yellow, as this will have lesser impact on users who have colored their worksheets differently, so maybe that is what we should go for?

[Conrad Preen]

@Nikolay Zhelyazkov

5 hours ago, Nikolay Zhelyazkov said:

I suppose that we can only change the color to white if it was yellow, as this will have lesser impact on users who have colored their worksheets differently, so maybe that is what we should go for?

That's probably the least painful approach all round. As @CharlesD has rightly observed, this will be used to create devices from an external imported worksheet. So how many people are going to spend time setting fancy colors instead of getting on with creating the devices?

[CharlesD]

Thanks for your input guys, much appreciated!

 

On the subject of row highlights in yellow: Instead of highlighting the whole row, you can also just highlight the Check column cell that CC auto generates. i.e. don't ever mess with user data, only change colors on CC cells. The counter argument is it (potentially) reduces scan-ability to not have the whole row highlighted. Personally, I don't think it's a huge problem for scan-ability. Furthermore, the highlighting is not too smart to begin with. In the example of the error for "Missing Make"-- why have CC highlight the entire row? If it knows the problem is missing Make field, why not just highlight the field that requires user action?