Hi Alan,

I'm glad you like the Available Symbols Palette (ASP) and we appreciate your suggestions.

It's quite common for users to show the same product instances in multiple drawings of the same type e.g. a system might be split into several 'type' schematics, like "AV", "Network", "Security" and the same product might appear in more than one, or all of those drawings.  We therefore believe that it's valid to list products unused in the current drawing in the ASP by default, even if they are used in other drawings of the same type.

Unfortunately, under the current architecture, a mode by which products used in other drawings would be omitted from the ASP could have extremely serious performance consequences: each time you switch drawings it would need to walk through ALL objects in ALL other drawings and compare the results to the objects in the current drawing to build the ASP.  Automatic filtering is therefore not currently an option.

We've considered a 'manual' setting for whether or not a product should be shown in the ASPs but feel that the UI would get unnecessarily complex and unwieldy.  For example, in a project of 185 products and 10 drawings - you know the one I mean! - you'd have 1850 discrete properties to set, or not, but each would have to be displayed somehow, somewhere.

At this time, therefore, we can't commit to either an automatic approach or a manual UI to achieve what you're looking for.

Having said that, we'll keep your suggestion on the wishlist and factor it in to consideration for future versions.

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com