I have a project thats nearing hundreds of conditions. This in itself is not a problem, and is actually the reason why we started to use flare in the first place.
But I have an annoyance which im seeking an answer to:
Is it possible to somehow change the way condition sets, and conditions inside a set are organized, when defining them in the target?
When having a lot of sets and conditions, id like to be able to go through them in other order than alphabetical. I would like to be able to fill them through the same order as my reference material is. One way is to put a number infront of each and every set and condition, but it causes a lot of manual numbering work, especially if I later decide to add some new condition fore example.
Thank you in advance!
Conditions
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ajturnersurrey
- Sr. Propeller Head
- Posts: 348
- Joined: Fri Nov 05, 2010 3:30 am
Re: Conditions
Sorry, I'm not aware of any official ordering mechanism. (It would be nice if they just came up in the order that they exist in the underlying xml file by default.)
The strategy I have is to give the condition tags tree structure in their names so that I can sort by Condition Tag wherever possible, but it is not ideal. I have a set of Product conditions that excludes material by product for instance that will get names like Not_BASICS_IP, Not_BASICS_IP_Gigabit, Not_BASICS_IP_Serial, Not_BASICS_Radio_Relay, Not_PRO_V25, Not_PRO_V50plus etc... In a separate file from the Product conditions, I have a set of Variant conditions, a set of FromVersion conditions and a set of DroppedInVersion conditions on most of my projects. It is this splitting of conditions with different purposes that I have found most useful.
The strategy I have is to give the condition tags tree structure in their names so that I can sort by Condition Tag wherever possible, but it is not ideal. I have a set of Product conditions that excludes material by product for instance that will get names like Not_BASICS_IP, Not_BASICS_IP_Gigabit, Not_BASICS_IP_Serial, Not_BASICS_Radio_Relay, Not_PRO_V25, Not_PRO_V50plus etc... In a separate file from the Product conditions, I have a set of Variant conditions, a set of FromVersion conditions and a set of DroppedInVersion conditions on most of my projects. It is this splitting of conditions with different purposes that I have found most useful.
Re: Conditions
I'm worried about the fact that you have hundreds of conditions. If you really have hundreds of different outputs (targets), then you probably need them, though I don't know how you're keeping track of what's what while trying to define the content. But if you have, say, 8 outputs, you shouldn't be having 2^8 = 256 conditions that define every possible combination of targets. Instead, make one condition for each target. In each target's condition settings, INCLUDE the condition named for that target and EXCLUDE all the other conditions. Then when you have content that belongs in targets 1, 3, 4, and 7, assign conditions 1, 3, 4, and 7 to that content. The INCLUDE overrides the EXCLUDE, so it will be included in those 4 targets, but it will be excluded from the other targets.
Re: Conditions
The large amount of conditions and variables comes from very complicated and customizable product, for which I produce manuals and documents with flare.
No project is the same, but small bits of them are. So each document I create is like a huge jigsaw I create by including certain content pieces with conditions by including and excluding content. Also, ive tried to make it so that one condition affects the content in many places in the documents, to reduce the amount of conditions to click. For example, including an "shaft_seal_air_flow_high_alarm_switch" condition adds the description of the switch in the device list, alarm address into the alarm list and the maintenance instructions into the maintenance section and a lot more. And these types of alarm sensors alone we have, say, 30 in one device, each one of them can be included or excluded, or from a different manufacturer in which case the content is again different
I have a flare project, lets call it "Manual" and I make a target file for each new device configuration we produce this manual for. I dont know if its the best way to go on, but it works for now, when im the only one working on this flare project. I am very interested in hearing other ways to do this.
The reason why I would like to organize conditions is, because I need to look up the information required for the manual from the software of the device, electrical planning software, our project documents and several other places. And when the conditions in the condition list jump around across these different sources I find my 3 computer screens to be filled with tens of documents I have to jump back and forth. Would be nice to Look up conditions from one document, then move on to the next, in an organized order
No project is the same, but small bits of them are. So each document I create is like a huge jigsaw I create by including certain content pieces with conditions by including and excluding content. Also, ive tried to make it so that one condition affects the content in many places in the documents, to reduce the amount of conditions to click. For example, including an "shaft_seal_air_flow_high_alarm_switch" condition adds the description of the switch in the device list, alarm address into the alarm list and the maintenance instructions into the maintenance section and a lot more. And these types of alarm sensors alone we have, say, 30 in one device, each one of them can be included or excluded, or from a different manufacturer in which case the content is again different
I have a flare project, lets call it "Manual" and I make a target file for each new device configuration we produce this manual for. I dont know if its the best way to go on, but it works for now, when im the only one working on this flare project. I am very interested in hearing other ways to do this.
The reason why I would like to organize conditions is, because I need to look up the information required for the manual from the software of the device, electrical planning software, our project documents and several other places. And when the conditions in the condition list jump around across these different sources I find my 3 computer screens to be filled with tens of documents I have to jump back and forth. Would be nice to Look up conditions from one document, then move on to the next, in an organized order