Constraints - hiding dimensional constraints? Yet another wishlist...

Nancy Eckert

I have found the way to hide geometric constraints, but I do not see any way to hide dimensional constraints. Nor have I discovered a way to put them on a layer that could be turned on/off. If I could add this to a current wishlist (the only wishlists I see are not current)... On the subject of dimensional constraints, is there a way to use them with VBA customizations? ie select d1 and then change the value?

Also on my wishlist would be the ability to have the xref manager opened and docked, similar to how you can in AutoCAD. 

And of course, the ability to open block editor outside of the current drawing. I really LOVED that feature when it came out in AutoCAD and miss it from BricsCAD. 

Annotative entities and paperspace should be more intuitive, unless I am missing something crucial to making this painless, it is just too painful! 

I would also love to see the CONSTANT attribute on attributes to ONLY do just that, make the value constant, NOT the position constant too. To me, lock position attribute should be the only thing that locks the attribute text position, not the CONSTANT attribute. That just doesnt make sense to me.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

Regarding your first wish:
Of course new dimensional constraints are put on the current layer. So the best way is to make the correct layer current before adding dimensional constraints. To change the layer of existing dimensional constraints you can use the _CHPROP command.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

... and _MATCHPROP can also be used.

Knut Hohenberg

And regarding your other wishes:

I'm also not completely happy with the modal explorer, but making only the xref explorer tab non-modal is IMO not a way to go. A comprehensive solution might be to integrate the explorer 'drawings' tab with the properties window into a single sidebar. The graphics area would then be just another icon listed under each open drawing, effectively turning the explorer into the application's main window, which I would regard more logical. Of course, this would mean a big change, and is not likely to ever happen...

As to the block editor: this has been brought up a number of times before, but I don't see why another window should be opened for this, simply switching the main graphics area to the block definition would IMHO be simpler.

As to annotations: totally agree, this feature looks so over-complicated to me that I did not even start using it. Things could have been so simple: modelspace units (INSUNITS) and a display scale (DIMSCALE) were already defined for many years, and by just adding a variable for layout units and a flag to entities that decides if their size is to be interpreted in model or layout units (nearly) everybody might have been happy. But the fact that Autodesk chose to allow for different units in each layout already complicated things, and their implementation of annotations did the rest to turn this into a mess... but what can Bricsys possibly do about that? Each deviation from AutoCAD's convoluted paths carries a big risk for them.
 
And regarding attributes: as far as I understand, constant attributes are very different from 'normal' ones, since they are part of the block definition instead of getting appended to it. In other words, it might be impossible to realize your wish without breaking dwg compatibility.

Scott McKenzie

 I would really like to see the ability to edit attributes inline without the attribute edit dialog box appearing and to be able to edit table entries without the mtext dialog appearing...