Hi guys,

I am currently in the 30 day trail. I have a few questions and wish for them to be answered with the technical answers and the not so technical answers.

For this product I decided to evaluate it against a few others. I work for a company and we are looking to upgrade the software.
I have a design plan....block diagram within an old program.....I have printed it off and recreating it within stardraw.

1 - The cable runs are problematic (this is by no means an insult to the program development) I just wish for someone to explain why connecting cable lines together is such an issue.

2 - Symbols are a bit limited and if you was not to renew the subscription service I am guessing you would lose the ability to add stubs to products.

3 Why can we not add just one terminal that has a node to a product? not a line or something like that but a blank hole so to speak that the cable connects to.

I like the program and it has great potential I just see the cable aspect as bit of problem, THIS COULD BE BECAUSE I AM MISS SOMETHING and I am prepared for that to be the case. 

Any Help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

I include a picture of what I wish to create and the issues I am having with descriptions.    (oh the blue dots is where I would like the cables to connect....why dose it not have connection points or snap to the line unless you want to go past it like underneath)

Hi Jay,

Thanks for your questions and the inclusion of images etc that illustrate your troubles.  I think the root problem is that you've gotten off on the wrong foot and by not using library symbols or standard working practices you've not only lost most of the benefits built into Stardraw Design 7.3, but also created some headaches for yourself, so it's a bit of a double-whammy.

Starting with first principles:
1) In the Block Schematic environment, Stardraw's library symbols and the grid are built to work together.  IOs in the Symbols sit on gridpoints and Snap to Grid is always on which means that it's easy to draw Cables between IOs that are neat, orthogonal (either horizontal or vertical) and evenly spaced.
2) Workflow: the imagined and expected workflow is that you insert your product symbols first and then, when the symbols you want to connect are present in the drawing, you add Cables between them.  This means that each Cable object is contiguous and can be created in a single action - there is no need to connect one Cable to another, so this functionality does not exist (although you can extend an existing Cable by adding nodes). It does not seem like a good workflow to add a symbol, then draw a bit of a cable, stop, add another symbol, draw a second cable from that and then attach this second cable somehow to the first; perhaps I've got it wrong but that seems very inefficient.
3) Products, Symbols and Symbol modification; The architecture of Stardraw Design 7.3 is product based.  Your project contains Products, and those Products are represented by Symbols.  When you add a product symbol into a drawing what you're really doing is a) adding a Product to your Project and b) representing that Product in the current Drawing with that Symbol.  We make the assumption that symbols are accurate i.e. all the IOs are present and correct.  Therefore if you find that you need to add IOs then you must be representing a new Product, one with inputs and outputs that are different from those of the current Product.  Therefore you should create a User Defined Product (UDP) and use the tools that are available to this subset of functionality to add IOs and whatever you want to your custom symbols.  For more on this see the movie "Adding New Products" which is #09 on the Stardraw Design 7.3 movies page

Back to your specific issues:

Question 1: it appears that you've started your drawing by adding some graphics that look like, for example, DIN rail terminals.  The graphics, however, are not Symbols representing Products, as far as I can tell, so a) SD7.3 doesn't know that they should support connections and b) they do not conform to any kind of symbol standard so don't sit on the grid and it will be hard or impossible, as you've found, to line up Cables neatly.

Solution: use Stardraw library symbols or create UDPs with correctly positioned IOs.

Question 2 pt1: I'm not sure what you mean by "symbols are a bit limited".  Do you mean that the library does not contain the Products you need, in which case see "What can I do if a product is missing from the library?" on the Stardraw Design 7.3 FAQs page, or do you mean that the symbol standard itself does not represent products in a way that you'd like?  If the latter, you are free to develop you own symbol standard and apply it to your own UDPs using the freeform Symbol Editor.

Question 2 pt2: no, even with a lapsed Subscription you can still use Stardraw Design 7.3 and edit symbols etc.  For a full run down on the services provided through the Subscription see our website's Subscriptions page.

Question 3: IOs can be added in the Symbol Editor, which is the correct way to do it for the reasons described above, but connections cannot be added to symbols in a drawing or, in the case of your drawing, arbitrary collections of graphics that do not represent a Product in the Project.  This is a rule based on the way Stardraw Design 7.3 works from an architectural standpoint.  From a technical standpoint you should know also that connection objects (the thing a Cable actually connects to) are created programmatically on-the-fly when a correctly formatted Symbol is inserted into the drawing; there is no possibility for arbitrary user-generated connection points to be created in a drawing. 

I hope that this makes sense and is helpful.  I think it could be of great benefit for you to watch some of the movies on the Stardraw Design 7.3 movies page, particularly #02 Basic Use, #04 Cable Tool and #09 Adding New Products - these should help you restart on the right track and overcome any pre- or mis-conceptions about functionality and workflow that may have hampered your efforts so far.

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com