Mail Archives: geda-user/2017/09/06/14:15:20
Hi all,
1. what we had already
pcb-rnd inherited a cute feature from mainline back in 2013: attribute
dialogs. These are generic purpose custom dialog boxes - you can see
exampels when exporting the design from the GUI, because the main/original
purpose was to provide a flexible way exporter attributes can be
presented.
In the original code the attribute dialog worked from a flat list of
"attributes" (values of different type, like integers, enums).
2. what's new
On top of this, recent development version of pcb-rnd introduces hierarchy
with 3 "composite" types:
- vbox (vertical box)
- hbox (horizontal box)
- table (regular grid placement)
Composite types can host plain old attributes or further composite types,
thus can be used to build complex dialog boxes with arbitrary arrangement
of widgets. These dialog boxes can be built and ran by core code or plugin
code or even user scripts. All current production GUI HIDs (lesstif and
all variants of gtk) support the new feature.
3. how is it going to be useful
The first example where we are going to use the new feature is the
subcircuit/buffer layer binding view/edit dialog. It will present a table
with two columns. On the left the "layer binding recipes" are shown, (e.g.
"second copper layer from the top") on the right the actual board layer
pcb-rnd calculated from the recipe. The user is free to change the
parameters of the recipe on the left (and request a re-binding) or
directly override the binding on the right side (in which case the recipe
for that layer will be ignored).
Regards,
Igor2
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