TechDraw Roadmap/en



The TechDraw workbench is still very much a work in progress. Not all functions are available, and not all functions work correctly. Here is a rough roadmap of areas to be addressed (in no particular order).

Coming Soon
<<< Update: this Pull Request was merged into master branch on 2016/10/31 >>>

A Pull Request has been submitted for:
 * Coverity fixes (internal technical changes to meet standards)
 * Section face hatching
 * remove XAxisDirectionProperty
 * heavily revised ViewSection
 * bug fix: projection group live preview for Automatic & Custom scaling
 * bug fix: projection group view direction

Projection Group
The Projection Group continues to be exasperating. The current version is restricted to "cardinal" directions (Front,Back,Top,Bottom,Left,Right) and their associated iso views and relies on large tables of view directions and rotations. There are almost certainly typographic errors in these tables. A proper geometric solution that supports arbitrary view directions is required.

Drawing Tools
This includes the ability to add leaders, callouts and detail highlights to Views. The detail highlights will be used in ViewDetail (see below).

ViewSection
The current implementation of ViewSection is buggy and limited. ViewSection will be revised to allow multiple sections based on the same base View, the creation dialog will be improved, and hopefully we'll get the arrows pointing in the right direction finally. *** Extensive changes to ViewSection processing were recently merged into master.

ViewDetail
This is the ability to create a View which enlarges a small portion of a base View. This is possible now to some degree with ViewClip, but it is not easy to use.

Documentation
The wiki entries for TechDraw are very sparse and need to be expanded considerably. *** several wiki entries have recently been updated.

Geometry Changes/Topological Naming
Dimensions can be adversely affected by geometry changes - both in the 2D drawing and the 3D model. This is related to the widely discussed "topological naming" problem. Investigations are underway to at least detect when a Dimension's underlying geometry has changed and invalidated the Dimension's value. **Update: a simple checksum solution has been investigated, but it generates too many false positives to be useful.

Python Bindings
The python bindings for basic TechDraw functions have fallen behind the C++ functions. The python routines need to be reviewed and brought up to date.

Test Suite
The self-test suite for TechDraw is quite limited at the moment. This should be expanded by an enthusiastic Python programmer!

Internationalization
Message/hint strings need to be reviewed to ensure the appropriate translate function are used.

Bug Fixes/Feature Requests
The are a number of bug reports and feature requests in Mantis and the forums. These will all be addressed eventually.
 * @bavariaSHAPE has provided a set of "shape and position tolerance symbols".  The EditatbleText logic in ViewSymbol may need to be revised to support these symbols.
 * Path module developers have requested enhancements to EdgeWalker.

Technical Debt
The recent rapid pace of TechDraw development has left in its wake numerous "technical imperfections" that should be addressed. One of the biggest involves appearance related Properties which belong to Feature instead of the ViewProvider. This results in unneeded recomputes of the model when only a graphic update is really required.

Recent Changes/Known Problems

 * improvements in findShapeOutline.
 * improvements in face detection.

Return to TechDraw Module main page.


 * Both phases of the performance improvement subproject have beeen merged into the master branch. In general, drawing generation is much faster, though not instantaneous.  Some drawings still take a long time.
 * The confusing "xDirection" property in Part and Section views is under review.  The goal is to replace it with a simple angular rotation property.   Pull Request submitted to remove this property.  View rotation will now be controlled only by the Rotation property.   <<< XAxisDirection property has been removed in master branch >>>