Peter wrote:
Seiss,
I was thinking about your question and decided that,
in effect, there is a way to get the error to display as soon
as you enter an invalid value in the settings dialog without
having to go to the 3D widow or the section/elevation window
to find out if you have entered an invalid value.
In the settings dialog select the preview to be the 3D view.
Immediately after you enter an invalid value in a parameter,
you will get the error message because the 3D script
has to run to display the 3D preview.
This, of course, does not help in finding out what the "valid" values are.
Peter Devlin
In principle, the GDL script should be written so as to preclude any invalid values. Unfortunately this is not always easy to do.
The fundamental problem with GDL is that the complexity of the programming increases exponentially (hyperbolically? there are probably already some proofs about this) with the number of parameters and variations in the part's functions. That is to say it is much easier to code a specific window than a generic single casement, which is still easier than a generalized multi-unit, etc.
I have seen the greatest success in custom parts when the parameters are very limited (a trestle table for example) or the performance spec is very clearly and strictly defined (as in the case of office standard symbols). Unfortunately custom parts don't work so well for general release.
I've already gone on (and on) about the solutions for this so I won't belabor it here.
