Possibility to have more than one material catalog, to import several setting catalogs

[morriswinkler]

What do you think about the possibility to have several settings presets that can exist beside each other, in the fablab berlin we have a settings catalog that you can download from the internet, most of us use that one and make custom settings to it.

It becomes very difficult if we want to manage a general settings catalog beside all the custom settings we do our self, it would be much easier to have a official catalog, and a private one beside that.

Naming convention could be decided on import, so if i import a settings zip file i am ask to give the catalog a name.

[mgmax]

This bug is probably blocked by #189 and related to #153.

Do you have ideas how it should look like in the GUI?

My first idea: multiple levels in the material selection dropdown:

FabLab Berlin
  Wood
  Acrylic
My own settings
  Wood
  Paper
  Cookie
Epilog 30W manufacturer settings
  Blabla

[peteruithoven]

If I understand the structure of Visicut correctly this is the current structure:

• lasercutter
  • material
  • thickness
    • profile (cut, engrave, mark etc)
    • settings (power, speed, etc)

I think makes sense sense because every lasercutter needs different settings. So instead of importing multiple catalogs I think it makes more sense to import separate lasercutter settings. This makes it easier to import settings into your existing settings when you visit a place with a lasercutter.

Your idea of separating your custom settings from the imported catalog requires users to manually switch between them. What if we would implement a "overriden" concept. When you update a lasercutter setting it updates all the settings except the ones you have overridden. If you added extra materials or thicknesses they would remain. It could even present the question; "Do you want to update all settings except the ones you've customized, or simply override all your settings for the ... lasercutter?".

One tricky thing is that some "settings" are very general, like the mappings, or the examples. I would like to find a way to merge these as well. Could we use git functionally for merging settings? Where it overrides settings only when they are older then the ones that are merged.

And by the way, why give every user that's need to import the burden of thinking of a name? Let's minimize this burden by having the one that exported come up with a name. If you do think it's important to have the option to customize the name maybe this question should come after importing settings and it's already filed in with the default.

[peteruithoven]

I've added a issue that explains my idea: #198