Feature suggestion: invert tag visibility behavior

[James Ribe]

With the new tagging system in ConDoc 5, it’s really easy to put multiple tags on a single object, but it seems to be useless to give an object more than one tag in each category because of the way that tag selection works. Giving an object more than one tag within the same tag category causes it to always be hidden in drawings. There are a lot of use cases where it’d make sense to put multiple tags within the same category on an object:

Example 1: the exterior walls on my building are the boundary between interior and exterior, so I want them to appear on both interior drawings and exterior drawings. I can work around that today by not giving them a location tag at all, but that only works because the location category typically only has those two tags.

Example 2: the objects that make up a building’s air barrier. If I want to export a drawing that has the air barrier highlighted in red (per Steve Baczek’s approach), I may have several objects that are pulling double-duty. I may have insulation, drywall, and sheathing objects that are also part of the air barrier.

Example 3: say I want to generate framing drawings. Each piece of the framing is also part of the walls, floors, or roof of the house.

The two workarounds in the current system that I’m aware of are:

1. Create an extra copy of the object for each unique tag combination. This workaround makes it particularly annoying to update the objects because you’ll need to use some strategy to keep the duplicate copies synchronized.
2. Create unique tags for each intersection of properties. This creates a combinatoric explosion of tags for every property that you add. Consider a sill plate that’s part of the air barrier. If I’m trying to generate air barrier and framing drawings from the model, that sill plate will need some silly-long tag like “ELEMENT_Floor, Wall, Framing, Air Barrier”. Every time I add a new dimension that I want to use to generate a drawing, I’ll need to update every viewport in the entire drawing set to be aware of all the unique tags that I added to support that dimension.

As far as I can tell, the visibility behavior could be made more intuitive by updating the algorithm to something like this:

for each object {
  show the object
  for each category of tag {
    if the viewport has no tags in this category {
      continue
    }
    if the object is not tagged with at least one of the viewport's tags in this category {
      hide the object
    }
  }
}

• This topic was modified 1 year ago by James Ribe.
• This topic was modified 1 year ago by James Ribe.

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