Monday 23 May 2011

ControlDraw version 3.6.1210 - Faster and Smarter

This new release provides some great improvements, especially for those of you who have large models and who want to use the Recipe Modelling capabilities to define master recipes.
The Recipe Modelling  developments are mainly intended to support recipes that can have a large number of parameters. For example the Descended Objects view can be used to create parameters in a Recipe Procedure by scanning all the child hierarchy of a recipe type diagram and finding all the lower level parameters (typically in Phases or Operation) and making copies of them.

The improved Diagram List view - this now shows the link page and link type and allows you to change them and to change object classes.
In addition it is now possible to view and hide/unhide diagram objects from the List View.
Hidden objects do not appear on diagrams but still generate data.
If a diagram has hidden objects a count of them automatically appears on the diagram. There is also a new special symbol, 'Hidden Symbols' that you can put on a diagram to show a list of them

When using the Descended Objects to create recipe parameters you are now asked whether to make them hidden. This is mainly intended to support things like recipes that can have a large number of parameters that you still want in the data tables.

The improvements with handling large models are mostly speed, large diagrams load much faster and the data build process has been accelerated. Where ControlDraw used to read the records and rebuild all objects when a diagram was opened and then save all the records when the diagram was closed, it now (optionally) only reads and updates on a symbol basis. For large diagrams the improvement is large, a complex diagram with about 200 objects including a large state matrix now loads in under 2 seconds compared with 8 seconds on a 3 yr old PC that is not state of the art.

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