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Consistent, Easy Custom Classing of all PIOs


Kevin McAllister

Question

I would like consistent, easy custom Classing of all PIOs.

Custom Classing is available in various ways right now including through the Plug-In manager. We need a consistent system that's easy to access (i.e.. all in one place) and transferrable forward to new versions of VW without having to re-enter it all after each upgrade.

Lots of items that should be custom Classable currently aren't (ie. the Callout tool). In fact the Callout tool can't even be set to use marker by Class as the default. I spend so much time declassing objects after they are created (Viewports, Crop Objects, Section Lines, the list goes on). Why can't this be improved?

Thanks,

Kevin

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Agreed. Standard Naming could do with a revamp or a replacement. Its very powerful but a bit confusing and as you've stated, inconsistent.

Submitting now.

I think altering Standard Naming's auto-classing (or adding a completely separate function)so that it allows users to map specific PIOs to custom classes, rather than mapping default classes to custom classes would be the cleanest and most user-controllable solution.

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While we're at it, can there be a default for viewport creation? Why viewports would be be in different classes is beyond me. I find it very funny (not) that we must name a viewport (which I've never done in my life) but we can't set the viewport's class itself upon creation, it's just whatever class happens to be active.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
One should be able to right click on any tool and set it's default insertion class.

I would think that setting each tool manually would be good, but being able to control it all from one location and save different standards for different files in addition to that would be important as well.

While we're at it, can there be a default for viewport creation? Why viewports would be be in different classes is beyond me. I find it very funny (not) that we must name a viewport (which I've never done in my life) but we can't set the viewport's class itself upon creation, it's just whatever class happens to be active.

I should think Viewports would be included as one of the PIOs that could be classed automatically under this wish. I think ALL plug in objects should be classable in this manner.

EDIT: Actually now that I think of it perhaps viewports arent strictly Plugins... but all object types, including viewports, should be covered under this auto classing.

Edited by JimW
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While we're at it, can there be a default for viewport creation? Why viewports would be be in different classes is beyond me. I find it very funny (not) that we must name a viewport (which I've never done in my life) but we can't set the viewport's class itself upon creation, it's just whatever class happens to be active.

I agree about a default class for viewport creation.

Viewport Naming is one of my biggest pet peeves about VW for one reason only. VW uses the Viewport Name, not the Drawing Name, for bookmark names when it creates a PDF. One of the dumbest defaults ever because as you say no one names their viewports, but everyone names their drawings. Jim, this stupidity should be fixed. Why these two things aren't one in the same is beyond me. (I've actually written a script that renames each viewport to match its drawing name field.)

Kevin

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I was not aware that was the case. I'll submit that separately, a wish for an option to choose in Publish/Export PDF whether to name each bookmark/viewport by the Viewport Name or Drawing Title.

(The only real reason I think it should be an option and not simply a change to the default is if everyone has already adhered to the old standard, they'd have to manually change each viewport if they hadn't been keeping up with both fields.)

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To me you should start with how classing works within the tool authoring environments. It should certainly be easier to use class and class attributes in VS/Python than it is.

 

Tool authors should have simple clear way to define a base case for the classes they want to use. Create objects in those classes and rely on them taking on the class attributes with a single line of code.

 

A consistent interface should then allow the user or CAD manager to tweak classes to suit.

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