Hacker News Reader

Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

It's very common (Fusion calls it User Parameters, etc.) and indeed nice practice. FreeCAD has a few ways to do it, Spreadsheets but also free-form properties on objects. It's very flexible in this regard.

View on HN

The Fusion implementation sucks. A spreadsheet is a far more natural way to do this, Im surprised FreeCad is doing it better than the paid variant.

The only issue I have with the Spreadsheet is that I need to add an alias for every value I want to use in the Sketch or Part Design workbench. In practice, this usually looks like

    A       B
    width   2mm
    length  3mm

and for every cell in B I add an alias with the same value as in column A. Is there a way around that?

VarSets[0] introduced recently in 1.0 and mentioned in a grand-aunt comment are a good alternative to spreadsheets used this way.

[0]: https://wiki.freecad.org/Std_VarSet

https://wiki.freecad.org/Macro_EasyAlias

EasyAlias macro maybe?

not "maybe" this is an absolute must if using parameters in a spreadsheet :)

Its existence has been used by the devs as a reason not to prioritise fixing user-facing bugs. It really should be in core at this point.

Oh. I didn't even know there were macros. But that looks very useful!

Hmmm - I seem to recall there was at least 1-2 scripts or macros available to help with aliasing.

The Fusion implementation is awful - you can adjust one variable, one time, then you have to reopen the dialog to do another. At least for me it's always become non-responsive after a single edit, for years now. I've always assumed I'm just holding it wrong, but I don't know. I've moved on.

The worst part about fusions implementation is that you CANNOT edit the User Parameters while you are viewing the part easily. I like to edit the params and drag it around, but it SUCKS in fusion

Super flexible. I love being able to use Python to manipulate spreadsheet data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com