Tool Palette Bar - Separator
I have been searching for a while and cannot seem to find much information on the BricsCAD Tool Palette Bar implementation. Could someone please try to field some/any of these questions for a guy coming from an AutoCAD background.
1) Do separators exist? I see that it can import an xtp file and thus even if I can't add one from within BricsCAD maybe it will add one from an import?
2) If there aren't separators, then how do I manage grouping subtask specific items together? I don't want to make a new palette for each group of 4 items that perform subtasks that a single palette is representing the entirety of primary task.
3) Are Light/Dark themes available?
4) How do they function on a tablet? I have a tool I would like to put on a surface pro and carry into the field.
5) Any issues with executing lisp through a palette button? Related questions: is a good VLIDE available? Are any of the ACET lisp functions are available?
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I have been searching for a while and cannot seem to find much information on the BricsCAD Tool Palette Bar implementation. Could someone please try to field some/any of these questions for a guy coming from an AutoCAD background.
1) Do separators exist? I see that it can import an xtp file and thus even if I can't add one from within BricsCAD maybe it will add one from an import?
Separators don't look to be supported, nor do flyouts. BricsCAD ignores these when you importing and xtp's.
2) If there aren't separators, then how do I manage grouping subtask specific items together? I don't want to make a new palette for each group of 4 items that perform subtasks that a single palette is representing the entirety of primary task.
For this functionality an alternative approach may be to use the Ribbon, Toolbars, or simple menu. These do support these features. Downside is that you would need to re-create from scratch. You wouldn't be able to re-utilise existing xtp.
3) Are Light/Dark themes available?
No
4) How do they function on a tablet? I have a tool I would like to put on a surface pro and carry into the field.
Sorry don't have any experience with this.
5) Any issues with executing lisp through a palette button? Related questions: is a good VLIDE available? Are any of the ACET lisp functions are available?
No issues. Create the tool in the CUI first, you can then add to the tool palette.
VLIDE & ACET. There is no VLIDE, and I don't think there are any plans to develop. I think the intention is to provide support for 3rd party applications that can potentially provide this functionality. On ACET a number of these functions are supported in V15. I suggest you take a look at the LISP developer support package, which is documented in the online help.
I suggest you also raise a support request, put your queries direct to Bricsys. They may be able to provide you with some insight on whether the features you seek are intended for future development.
Regards, Jason Bourhill CAD Concepts
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Sorry for the format of my message. Forum functionality is woeful.
Regards, Jason Bourhill CAD Concepts0 -
Thank you Jason,
If I were to go ahead and develop a ribbon, does BricsCAD do context sensitive ribbon swapping? In my circumstance that would actually be a negative feature. My intention is to put everything on a single interface that a field detailer (minimal CAD knowledge) would need to accomplish his task of gathering field information for the office.
VLIDE: Trying to do an AutoCAD->BricsCAD migration without an IDE debugger sounds like an unreasonable hassle to me. They should really reconsider their standpoint on avoiding it. Even if it just emulated the "break on error" functionality of VLIDE it would be a very big deal. A "nice to have" would be letting me query the current value of any specified variable at the time of error and I would be on easy street from there. I think those 2 basic features are a mandatory requirement, but generally speaking if BricsCAD made a better VLIDE and I owned both packages, then I would be doing all of my AutoCAD lisp in it too. The Autodesk one is dreadful and intentionally no longer developed/ignored except under critical failure situations, but it does provide an irreplaceable functionality.
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The more I think about it, hopefully my work just plain does work in BricsCAD or the lack of an IDE is a deal breaker. I am not doing simple things, I have dynamic blocks (which are supposed to work in v15) full of attributes and I am very heavily puppeteering/evaluating them with Lisp routines based on user input. I am not all that interested in playing a guessing game with 250kb of code.0
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Josh,
The BricsCAD Ribbon is not context sensitive, essentially it's a glorified toolbar. Whether this will change with future releases I don't know.
For me, I don't suffer from the lack of VLIDE. Perhaps there are some LISP developers that can offer some better opinion here. To be fair VLIDE hasn'y exactly been in active development, it hasn't seen any TLC in years. Torsten Moses would be the best to respond here on plans for BricsCAD, but I think the main idea is why create an application (which you would then have to maintain), when there are so many excellent actively maintained ones available. Some of these such as ultraedit have the potential to add debug tools via plug-in.
I do know that BricsCAD LISP has a different approach in how it operates. BricsCAD is more verbose when you strike errors, it tends to identify the point of error, and gives detail from the stack surrounding it. I find this very helpful when resolving bugs. It also creates log (log.tmp) files capturing error messages. BricsCAD LISP also provides some advantages in that it generally runs an order of magnitude faster than in AutoCAD. Rakesh Rao has reported on this on a number of occasions on his blog and on Bricsys TV.
Dynamic block support is a more difficult proposition. BricsCAD can work with dynamic blocks, but you cannot create them. Also if your using some of the more recent features in your dynamic blocks such as constraints, then you may have issues with getting them to work in BricsCAD. Here the development of features in the Platinum version of BricsCAD is interesting in that it shows the potential of creating something similar to the functionality of dynamic blocks from within the BricsCAD environment. Of course this probably of no practical use to you at this time.
I think your approach of asking questions on the forum is a good, there are many people here that can provide you with good advice. I also recommend that you raise support requests on issues you strike. These should get routed to people that can give you an informed response, and potentially alternative approaches.
Regards, Jason Bourhill CAD Concepts0
