Hi Rob,

I love the feature where in the product grid it is possible to determine if a particular symbol within the project is being used and in which drawing. Clicking on the reference (eg. pictorial) actually takes us to the correct drawing.

The problem I encounter with this is that within a huge project, where say there are 50 instances of that symbol we are trying to locate, being in the correct drawing is just a small portion of the research, Within that drawing it becomes time consuming trying to locate a particular instance of a multiple times used symbol. Do you have pointers for us to accelerate this research?

Note: we do use the product grid to insert pointers as to where the symbol should be, such as room/location/etc. but if an error is inserted we then need to locate that symbol, wherever it might be, to correct it.

Regards,

Pasquale

Hi Pasquale,

We'll look into this - some new functionality would be needed to enable identification of a Product Instance in a drawing based on its selection in the Products view.

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

Hi Rob,

Relating to the products grid -

1. On my PC, the links side that take you to the instance of the simple don't render correctly until you mouseover them.

2. If I export the products grid as an excel file, not all the fields are present - notably Name and the name of the drawing a product is on (I have a project divided up into parts, so to know which part a product is in on the report would be very helpful).

3. Is it possible to make the columns sortable (by clicking on the headers as you would in other applications)?

4. Some products don't appear on the export and the products list. I think this relates to my earlier issue with having grouped them - it's the ones that were pasted in as part of a group that don't seem to appear. (I created a digi signage player & screen , connected them together, arranged them into a group, then copied & pasted as required.)


Thanks

Philip

Hi Philip,

Thanks for the post. The Products Grid is a third party component which means that it is not always easy to make changes or add functionality, if it's possible at all. There are some known issues which we will have to live with for the time being which, in the answers below, I indicate as 'known issue'.

1) Known issue, but with a sweep of the mouse it is easy to update the links.

2) Omission of the Name field is a bug - thanks for pointing it out - and we will publish an update that fixes this in due course. Omission of the Drawing name is by design and we do not currently plan to change this - there are technical reasons for this decision. However, a better solution might be to use a custom Attribute that would allow you indicate, for example, a Drawing Reference, and this would be output in the Excel file.

Use Tools | Personalization | Settings to define custom Attribute fields to be added to all products in your projects; just add one or more lines to the Product Attributes list box. To add new fields to products in an existing project choose Edit | Update Attribute Values. These Attributes will populate the Products view, but you may need to Save, close and re-open the project for the new column(s) to be shown in the Products view.

3) No. Known issue.

4) We're unable to reproduce the effect you describe - if symbols representing products are grouped in a drawing, the product instances they represent are shown in the Products view. I suspect that if you've grouped something in another drawing and pasted into the current one, the Group is being treated as an arbitrary graphic object, not a Product Instance. It would probably be better to create a UDP that contains the data you want because insertion of a UDP will create a valid Product Instance. Perhaps if you can share the project with us and give a detailed description of how to reproduce the effect from scratch we can better understand what you're doing.

I hope this is helpful.

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

Rob,

Thanks - I spotted some of the answers in other posts after I'd written this.

If I added the custom attribute would that then appear in the export? Can I set that attribute's value for all items on a drawing? I have 3 drawings representing different sections of a system (2 lecterns and a control area), and want to export a shopping list that lists which section a product belongs to. I've done it now by populating the location fields, but it's laborious - even an autocomplete function would help greatly (type two characters and it suggests the rest), and help with keeping data clean.

I've emailed you the project with the broken products that were grouped together so you can have a look at it.

Thanks

Philip

Hi Philip,

Thanks for emailing the file - we are aware of an issue relating to the association of Attributes with symbols that are in groups that have been copied. We’re working on a fix, but it may be some time. The current workaround is to copy the symbols etc before grouping – it is only the copying of groups (in which you want to then change Attribute values) that is affected by this issue - or, select the group, ungroup, copy, paste, group the pasted objects; all will then be fine.

Regarding your other questions:

If I added the custom attribute would that then appear in the export? - Yes.

Can I set that attribute's value for all items on a drawing? - If the drawing contains only symbols, yes. Otherwise just select all the symbols (using Shift + Click) and set the common value for all the symbols in the selection in a single action. Only symbols representing products would support the custom attribute.

I hope this is helpful.

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com