T-FLEX Parametric CAD. Fundamentals. 2D Design

Control Elements. Creating User Defined Dialog Boxes
example, for creating a simplified parametric drawing on the page of the dialog box. In this way, the user can
evaluate the changes made to the model parameters by this drawing.
Dialog pages
All control elements of a dialog should be located on one page. Dialog elements can be placed on a drawing
page or on an additional manually created page. However, we recommend placing control elements on a
separate page of “Controls” type, created automatically. Such page is assigned “Custom” format with the
paper height and width recommended for dialog boxes, as well as optimum font size and grid step for
dialogs.
The dialog box size is defined by the value of the parameter "Paper size" in the command
"Customize|Status" (the tab “General”), defined for the dialog page. The size of the dialog box can be
modified via the parameters of the mentioned command or by using the command "Customize|Page
Size".
For automatically created “Controls”-type pages, grid display is turned on for easy positioning of control
elements. To turn off the grid or to change its step, use the command “Customize|Grid”. If necessary, you
can turn on snapping to existing 2D nodes or use the absolute coordinates.
The dialog box can be used in the future for editing the model external variables. Therefore, the
automatically created dialog page is added for convenience to the list of pages on the tab “Preferences” of
the command "Customize|Status". You need to switch the parameter “Marked variable editor” to the
option “Pages”, and check mark the created dialog page in the list of pages.
The page name will be used as the dialog box title. The page name can be modified using the command
"Customize|Pages…" or with the help of the command “Rename” found in the context menu for the tab
of the given page.
Multipage dialogs
A T-FLEX CAD document may contain an arbitrary number of dialog pages. You can build separate dialogs
for various groups of parameters and specify different scenarios of the dialogs interaction. The two main
scenarios of the dialogs interaction are as follows:
Complex multi-tab dialog box. Separate dialog boxes are joined into a complex one with tabs, each tab
corresponding to a particular contributing dialog box;
Main-subordinate dialog scheme. In this scheme, one of the dialogs is rendered main and appears upon
calling the command “Parameters|Model”, while the rest of the dialog boxes are called, if necessary, via
the controls of the main dialog.
The combination of the two schemes is also possible.
When creating a dialog box with tabs, keep in mind that the pages of the dialogs being joined must have
same size. Otherwise, all pages and their respective elements will be forced to scaling to the size of the first
one.
The second scheme that relies on using several dialog boxes allows different page sizes.
General principles of creating control elements
To create a dialog box use the command “Create Control”. It can be called by one of the following means:
Keyboard Textual Menu Icon
“Draw|Control”
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