CAD Layer Status Dialog

Pressing the Layer Status icon in any CAD view displays a dialog similar to that below. Each layer within the CAD model is listed, together with their Status and the number of elements (Size) each layer contains. Note the Cancel button will abort any changes and cancel the dialog completely.

Cad status's can be one of the following values. These can be set by the first five buttons on the right of the dialog.

• Active - Elements on that layer can be seen and edited.
• Visible - Elements can only be seen.  They can not be edited or locked to.
• Off - All elements on the layer are no longer drawn.
• Inactive - Takes Off a stage further and eliminates the extents of the layer from any zoom to extents calculations.  Very useful if a layer has strange objects on it at a large offset from the rest of the drawing.
• Deleted - Indicates a layer has been marked for deletion.  Pressing Cancel will stop this though.
• Current - All new elements are added to this layer. It can also not be deleted, or have its status changed. Only one layer can be current.

Layers can be Renamed via the button provided, however the same constraints exist as if naming a new layer (see below).

To delete one or more layers from the list, simply select them and press Delete.  You will be asked to conform this action.  If the list of layers is so long that the message box is off of the bottom of the screen, simply press OK to confirm, or hit the Escape key to cancel.   The status will then change to Deleted. Any elements using these layers will also be deleted when the screen updates.

Invert is a handy tool to inverse the list of selected layers. i.e. those that were selected are no longer, and vise versa.  

To generate a text report which can be referred back to, that lists the status of each layer press the Report button.

The functionality of the buttons across the bottom of the dialog is as follows.

• New - Displays a dialog which asks for a new layer name, and then a second dialog which allows the default properties of the layer to be defined.
  • A layer name can be up to 255 characters long (double-byte or alphanumeric), and include letters, numbers, spaces, and several special characters. Layer lists are sorted alphanumerically, with special characters first, numbers in value order, and alpha characters in alphabetic order.
  • Layer names cannot include the following characters: < > / \ “ : ; ? * | = ‘
    
    
• Properties - Allows the default colour, linestyle, pointstyle etc.. of a layer to be re-defined.
  
  
• Layers - Displays a dialog which allows standard layers in the n4ce Project to be added to the current CAD model/drawing.  By design when a new CAD Model is created, only the Default layer is present.
  
  
• To Project - Copies the selected layers and their properties back to the main n4ce project. This is an excellent way to setup new layers for use in a project as it allows them to be simply copied from an existing drawing, whilst maintaining all of the colours and other settings in one go.
  
  
• Snapshots - If a drawing contains a large number of layers, it can be annoying to constantly have to turn layers on and off to have different data shown.  Snapshots saves the list of layers and their states under a given name.  So that the state of the layers can later be changed on mass simply by selecting an appropriate snapshot. Use the Create button to take a snapshot of the current layers and their status. Then Select to change the status of the layers in the view to that of the selected snapshot. Update will change the settings in an exiting snapshot to match those currently in the view. Delete removes a snapshot from the list entirely.