kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Sidebotham <brian.sidebotham@...>]

On 2 March 2010 03:25, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@...> wrote:
> Brian Sidebotham wrote:
>> On 1 March 2010 21:23, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@...> wrote:
>>> Brian Sidebotham wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I have been looking at doing a patch to allow a list of default field
>>>> names to be defined for eeschema's libedit.
>>>>
>>>> Problem: When creating new components with additional information,
>>>> such as ordering codes and manufacturer part numbers, etc. you will
>>>> currently need to edit the field names yourself for every component.
>>>> This can quickly become tiresome.
>>>>
>>>> You could start with a blank part that has been saved to a library
>>>> with the field names defined, but this means that you cannot use the
>>>> New Component mechanism in libedit to create a new component.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Proposal 1: Would be for me to do a couple of patches to eeschema to
>>>> add this support to the project file structure:
>>>>
>>>> (a) Add Default Field Name support in the project file (e.g.
>>>> DefFieldName0=Manufacturer, etc.)
>>>> (b) Add Editing of the default field names in the GUI.
>>> Brian,
>>>
>>> I like proposal 1 personally because that is how I work.  It would be
>>> nice if your default field name editor was capable of applying the
>>> changes to existing components in a schematic as well as any new
>>> components.  Even better would be a simple grid editor with fields as
>>> columns and components as rows so that you could populate your user
>>> defined fields in mass instead of one component at a time.  I'm just
>>> throwing these ideas out to get people thinking about it.
>>
>> Hi Wayne,
>>
>> Thanks for the quick response. The default field names will be applied
>> to old and new components via the field edit dialog that Dick has
>> already written. This is used when you [E]dit a component in the
>> schematic, and when you are creating a new component.
>>
>> At the moment, this dialog sets the default field names by simply
>> making a string out of Field and the field number (N) as a suffix.
>>
>> I propose that instead, a list of default names is created as a
>> project preference and read much like the library name list. If there
>> is no custom default name, we can still drop back to the standard
>> default of FieldN.
>
> This sound like a reasonable approach.
>
>> The grid based editor as you suggest would be a great, that would make
>> stuffing these fields with values a lot less tedious. Handy when a
>> part number field depends on the components value, etc.
>>
>> This is actually a bit of a pre-cursor to me wanting to add heavy
>> symbol support into KiCad, which also really requires aliases to be
>> improved too. I think Jean-Pierre has been doing some work in this
>> area, trying to get rid of the .mdc library files.
>
> I haven't looked at JP's changes yet.  I was the one who originally
> proposed getting rid of the .mdc file.  I got a little side tracked with
> all of the things I was working on.  I'm almost done with my new
> EEschema find dialog work.  Once the next release is out, I'll commit
> the new find work then I'll revisit getting rid of the .mdc file.  If I
> remember correctly, I wasn't really happy with changes to the component
> library file format using my original concept.  Then Dick started
> working on his DSN lexer so I thought I would wait until he got that
> stabilized and then use it for the new library file format.  I'll see if
> I can make getting rid of the .mdc file and moving to a DSN style file
> format at the same time.  I'll make sure not to break reading the
> current file format.  This shouldn't effect anything you are planning on
> doing.
>
> Wayne

Okay, that all sounds good. I will wait a few days for the dust to
settle and any other opinions to surface and then I'll do a patch for
supporting default field names in the project file.

Best Regards,

Brian.