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Ability to lock resources, classes, etc.


Christiaan

Question

In Mac OS X (and probably Windows) there is the ability to lock files and folders. Not necessarily with a password but you can lock them and if someone wants to edit them in some way they have to unlock them first.

I'd like to have this ability within VectorWorks, i.e. I'd like to be able to lock certain aspects of our resources and templates.

In a perfect world everybody in an office would know that they shouldn't create their own classes wily nilly. And they would know that they shouldn't simply edit standard symbols but instead duplicate and rename them first. But, although I'm working on it, we don't live in a perfect world.

So there are things that I'd just like to lock down. Not neccesarily with a password, but just to create an extra step to flag up to people that "hey, there must be a reason this is locked, maybe I should ask first before changing that."

So, for instance, one thing I'd really like to lock would be the top level of the class structure. i.e I'd like to stop people from adding new top-level classes to their files. And if someone pastes in some random object with new top-level classes VectorWorks would say "Can't do that sorry, either you have to unlock the top level of classes or you need to reassign the incoming classes."

The other thing would be standard symbols. So in order for people to change certain symbols they'd either be forced to unlock it or duplicate and rename them first.

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If you can provide details about the oversight and management, I'll be able to relay that feedback, too.

With relative and absolute path management now, workgroup referencing does not require as much oversight as it had in the past. The ability to just reference in resources doesn't require too much manamgement, from my perspective. If you have thoughts on that, I'd be interested to hear them.

As a side note - if you could "lock" a class or resource in VW like you suggest, who would you want to be able to unlock a class or resource? Or would the "unlock" capability not be available?

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If you can provide details about the oversight and management, I'll be able to relay that feedback, too.

Okay, I'll give it a go and get back to you.

As a side note - if you could "lock" a class or resource in VW like you suggest, who would you want to be able to unlock a class or resource? Or would the "unlock" capability not be available?

In the examples above I would want anyone to be able to unlock them, so it simply acts as a reminder to people that they should think before they act. But the option of imposing an admin password would probably be handy in some instances too (probably best hooked into the native OS security on Windows and Mac OS X).

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... it is common to have a portions of a drawing in which moving them could cause problems, such as columns and column lines....

Jodyb17 you can already lock individual objects such as grid lines so they won't move if that is what you mean.

Edit menu/lock.

This is slightly different to Christiaans request I think.

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Maybe this will do for classes:

PROCEDURE LockMWillYa; { @ Petri Sakkinen 2007 }

VAR

theClass : STRING;

PROCEDURE DoIt (h : HANDLE);

BEGIN

SETOBJECTVARIABLEBOOLEAN(h, 700, TRUE);

END;

BEGIN

theClass := GETCLASS(FSACTLAYER);

FOREACHOBJECT(DoIt, C=theClass);

END;

RUN(LockMWillYa);

So, you select an object, run the command and all objects in that class will be locked.

To unlock, make a copy of the script (or menu command) and change TRUE to FALSE.

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