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mwganson / DynamicData

FreeCAD workbench for creating and managing custom property container objects.
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
41 stars 8 forks source link

Renaming of entries #45

Open zardozerr opened 3 years ago

zardozerr commented 3 years ago

I've been using dynamic data recently, and so far I prefer it to the spreadsheet because it seems to be faster to add new entries. Great work on this! One thing I noticed is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to rename entries. What I've had to do to rename something is delete it, then recreate it. Is there a way to actually rename that I'm missing? You can rename the groups it seems by right-clicking on an item, but not the item itself.

mwganson commented 3 years ago

You can't rename dynamic properties in FreeCAD other than by deleting them and creating new ones. The reason for this is it's not supported in FreeCAD at this time as dynamic properties are relatively new, as opposed to named constraints and spreadsheet aliases. The problem with doing this in the workbench, in other words, giving the user the illusion of renaming a property while actually deleting it and creating a new one for him, problem with that is the references to that property are broken the moment it gets deleted. So, the newly "renamed" property would no longer be referenced, which is definitely not what the user would be expecting. Perhaps it could be coded in the workbench a way to track down all the references and update them, but that's not a rabbit hole I want to go down. Dynamic property renaming should be handled in FreeCAD and not in a workbench. Perhaps that will come in the future.