Property editor

Overview
The Property Editor is one of the most important tools of FreeCAD and a main element while working with FreeCAD. The Property Editor allows managing the properties of the objects in your document.

Generally the Property Editor is intended to deal with just one object at one time. The values shown in the Property Editor belong to the active object of your active document (be careful of which document is really active if you work on multiple documents). If you did not select any element (or there are no elements), the Property Editor will be blank.

Not all the properties can be modified in any moment. Depending on the specific status, some properties will be shown as read-only.

The properties of an object are grouped in View properties and Data properties, and shown under different tabs.

Different objects may have different properties. However, some properties are common among all objects, for instance the position and the rotation of an object are Data properties that can be manipulated.

Property definition
A property is a piece of information like a number or a text string that is attached to a FreeCAD document or an object in a document. Properties can be viewed and modified with the Property editor.

Properties play a very important part in FreeCAD, since it has been designed to work with parametric objects, which are objects defined only by their properties.

Custom scripted objects in FreeCAD can have properties of the following types:

Properties
There are two types of feature properties accessible through tabs at the bottom of the property editor:
 * : properties related to the "visual" display of an object.
 * : properties related to the "physical" parameters of an object.

Data


Every feature has a placement that can be controlled through the Data Properties table. It controls the placement of the part with respect to the coordinate system. NOTE: The placement properties do not affect the physical dimensions of the feature, but merely its position in space! If you select the title Placement, a button with appears to the right. Clicking this button, opens the Tasks_Placement options window.

An angle is set here, and the axis that the angle acts upon is set with the axis property. The feature is rotated by the specified angle, about the specified axis. A usage example might be if you created a revolution feature as required, but then needed to rotate the whole feature by some amount, in order to allow it to line-up with another pre-existing feature.

The exact value of rotation comes from the angle property (above). This property takes three arguments, which are passed as numbers in the x, y, and z boxes in the tool. Setting a value for more than one of the axes will cause the part to be rotated in each axis, by the angle value multiplied by the value for the axis. For example, with an angle of 15° set, specifying a value of 1.0 for x, and 2.0 for y will cause the finished part to be rotated 15° in the x-axis AND 30° in the y-axis.

This takes three arguments, which are passed as numbers to the x, y, and z boxes in the tool. Setting a value for more than one of the boxes will cause the part to be translated by the number of units along the corresponding axis.



PS: The displayed properties can vary, depending on the tool used.