Provide a customizable way for users to auto-populate text fields in the drawing such as to support auto-fill of titleblock and the like. The process should be customizable without the need to write code. Also, it needs to support both User specific and Organizational settings. For example, a User specific might be the user’s name. Organizational specific might be the Company name or the name of the Division. The User specific should be under the control of the User, but the Organizational settings should be a shared common data-source.
Make use of the existing Linked Page-text feature that allows Page-text to pull its string from Custom Properties. Enhance the IRONCAD product to use a set of customizable configuration files to specify what values to use to populate the drawing’s Custom Properties. For example, user might modify all the corporate drawing templates to use two separate page text objects, each linked to its own custom property.
The drawing template’s document Properties would contain these custom properties.
When the template is used to create a new drawing or by explicit command by the user, IRONCAD will read the values for these custom properties from special configuration files. We envision that two files would be used: User_Custom_Properties_Config file and the Common_Custom_Properties_Config file (actual name of files may differ in final implementation). IRONCAD will look first in one of these files for a default value for the Custom Property, and if the custom property is not listed in that file, it will look in the other config file. The user would specify which (User or Common) file should take precedence. In this way, we would be able to support both defaults that are shared across an organization (such as the Company Name) as well as unique to each user (Author name).
Options added to Tools Options pages under the Technical Drawing page.
The configuration file will use a simple XML format shown below. Each “Add” line is a Name-Value pair defining a custom property. In the example below, the name of the first custom property is “Designer” and the value is “Czarne Fooboo”. Currently, only string values are supported.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<TechDrawing>
<CustomProperties>
<Add Name="Designer" Value="Czarne Fooboo"/>
<Add Name="Division" Value="Area 51"/>
</CustomProperties>
</TechDrawing>
The rule for handling same custom property located in both the Common and User configuration file is that the User wins (since it is the most specific of the two).