Property editor

=Property Editor=

Overview
The Property Editor is one of the most important tools of FreeCAD and a main element while working with FreeCAD. With the Property Editor you can handle a lot of different properties of the Elements of your document.

Generally the Property Editor is intended to deal with just one element per time. The shown values in the Property Editor belongs to the active element of your active document (be care of what is really active if you work an multiple documents). If there is not a choosen element or if there is no element the Property Editor doesn't show any properties or parameters.

Not all the shown properties ar changeable at any time. Sometimes properties are shown but invariable.

One of the concepts of FreeCAD is to assigning the position of an element always as some concrete properties of one concrete element. Therefore you don't find a "translate" or "rotate" command, menu or button which works for some different elements at the same time. All possible (and allowed) transformations are done per element by changing the corresponding values in the Property Editor.

The second important concept is the managing of display properties also per element and with the help of the Property Editor. It's just the "FreeCAD-way" to handle the display properties.

If you've tried some other CAE-Helpers maybe you start to like it :)

Example:

The default value is 10 mm

The default value is 10 mm

The default value is 10 mm

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

Function
The Property Editor has two "tabs" for his two main functionalities: the tab "View" gives you access to the properties concernig the displaying of the active Element. The tab "Data" let you modify basic parameters of the element. At first you found here the positioning of an element. This is usually splitted in two main groups: at one hand there is a three values for the three dimensions of the position of the element. At the other hand ther are four parameters for a possible rotation of the element: the three axes x, y and z (usuable as the vector for the rotation-axe) and an angle for the rotation about the given vector. Futhermore there can be geometric parameters as length or diameter values, pattern options like occurences.