Last night I worked late into the night on what I thought would be a relatively simple start to what inevitably will become a complex iLogic SmartPart configuration.
As you can see in the image to the right (if you were to click on it 
), I set up the basic parameters that describe a drawer as iLogic Rules. In the case of a drawer, the first question that needs to be answered is what is the material for the sides? The choices I’ve come up with so-far are Solid Lumber, Plywood, and Melamine—-which would be typical of most cabinet component manufacturers. Whatever the choices are in the real-world, they should determine what downstream options are available. The downstream options I included (so-far) are the side thickness, edge detail, and finish type.
I have written the iLogic Code that filters out whole parameter sets, such as shutting off the choice of Melamine and Plywood if Solid Lumber were selected (image above). I have also set up defaults for available choices, for instance: when Plywood is chosen as the main construction material, the plywood type is defaulted to ‘Euro Birch Economy’ and the thickness is defaulted to 0.5.These settings should also have the option to default to ‘last used’ but I’m not sure that is possible with iLogic by itself. I’ll look into it…
I was also able to fairly easily filter the available thicknesses. For example: if Plywood or Melamine is chosen as the main material, ½” and ⅝’ thicknesses are available in the drop-down. If Solid Lumber is chosen, 1” is added. Easy peasy ……and all with existing iLogic rules.
OK, so you’re saying to yourself, ”Yeah, numbers are a piece of cake, but what about the text values?” The answer is simple. Hell if I know. The next choice in this exercise is the top edge detail, and is a perfect example of me not knowing something.
If Melamine is chosen as the main material, Flat should be the only choice available from the dropdown list. With either of the other choices (Solid Lumber and Plywood), Bullnose needs to be available as well. As you can see in the image below, the Top_Edge_Detail parameter has the Equation ‘Bullnose’. That’s it. There is no way of knowing what other values are available from the iLogic Rule Editor. If you have a long list, you need to write it down somewhere, and this inevitably introduces errors.
But beyond that (major) flaw, there is no iLogic code snippet that deals with text strings in MultiValue rules ……at least not one that I can find. The rule used for the thickness values (MultiValue.SetList“Side_Thickness”, 0.5, 0.625, 1.0)) will not work for text.
I don’t really have the time to hunt down Visual Basic code to work around this limitation at the moment as I would like to get this part somewhat operational before the holiday, so I’m going to take a look at a configurator and see if it can handle this task without pulling teeth. I will also need make this part to be web configurable, something iLogic does not do at all so, maybe its better to jump straight into configuratin’ anyways.
I’ll post later today if I can get up to speed with my configurator fast enough, but I may have a major brain fart. If that happens, all bets are off…
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