A Review/Comment system with notes in FreeCAD?

[bitacovir]

I saw the new Label feature in FreeCAD 0.17 that allow display info linked to an element with a line. Very cool. But I was wondering if it would be too complicate to expand a bit the functions of this feature to be used as Review/Comment System in FreeCAD. Something to write and track notes as reviews and comments in a document as you can do in Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF. I created a screenshot with the idea.
This way people can share a FreeCAD file and leave reviews in the same document with a graphical reference to the object in the design.The notes remain in the document as a part of the process of a design development. This could be very useful during a team workflow.


Do you think it would be useful a Review/Comment system in FreeCAD using labels and notes?


OS: Windows 10
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.17.11203 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: e2e1f44b45737f8b900a4ac7766f8f064c434638
Python version: 2.7.8
Qt version: 4.8.7
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.1.0

review_comments_in_freecad.png (941.34 KiB) Viewed 2385 times

[Jee-Bee]

@vejmarie was busy with something similar... Don't know if it is added to the FreeCAD source...
see: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 10#p147764

[saso]

For BIM (Arch) we were looking in to supporting the BCF (BIM Collaboration Format) that is used for such interactions on IFC models...

http://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/speci ... f-releases
https://www.solibri.com/bim-collaborati ... planation/

[yorik]

Hm interesting idea.

I've been involved recently in a project with many participants around a BIM project, where most of the commenting and issue tracking was done by annotations over pdf docs in bluebeam. This actually turned out pretty hard to track after a couple of weeks, lots of notes being added everywhere, and not very easy or clear way to "process" the queue. Issue trackers used in programming seem much more efficient to me..

So if I would (maybe I will ) design a review system for FreeCAD, I think I'd rather start with an open-source issue tracker system, and then add an interface in FreeCAD to link with that system, so you would do most of the issue-solving work inside the tracker, and would just have a kind of "back and forth links" (a way to jump to the correct 3D location from the tracker, and a way to jump to the tracker from the model) with maybe a couple of helper tools like "mark as done"

But I also liked what you did on the screenshot, with the "dialog" appearing in the tree... There might be a way to have both, like for ex. a new widget similar to the tree view, that would load the contents of the issue tracker, and display it that way, like a "dialog", inside FreeCAD...

This could become an interesting project!

[Jee-Bee]

I think this kind of features are widly useble. If i may ask to ad the review/ comment system on a location where every user can acces it.
For me this means please not in Arch ...

Do we want to put that work upstream into FreeCAD/Mod or do I instantiate a FreeCAD/Mod project into OpenCompute Group repos ? It is up to you to decide !

Is your'e work still up to date?

[microelly2]

I like this idea,
if it is possible to add a link to a website or a database this can be a powerful tool.
I work at the moment on a way to connect FreeCAD with a neo4j database.
there I can store data for different domains
if the label is an intelligent link to such a domain, then every domain can have its own structure and methods (bug tracker, meta information, ...)

[bitacovir]

I think this kind of features are widly useble. If i may ask to ad the review/ comment system on a location where every user can acces it.
For me this means please not in Arch ...

Yes, I think the same. It is wonderful that people are already thinking in more BIM features related whit this topic. But sometimes a generic/simple element can be a powerful and flexible tool. I think on users that are not working in a BIM environment or they do not need to deal with sophisticated tracker system:

- Professor giving feedback to student work.
- Descriptions of a model parts for a client.
- Assemble instructions of a Ikea's furniture in the Exploded Assembly Workbench
- Feedback of FreeCAD users on a shared model in the Forum community.

[yorik]

I agree this shouldn't be Arch-specific. Of course there si the BCF format which is interesting, but ideally if we have a good, generic system, it shouldn't be too hard to make it output BCF code when needed.

So we could prepare a plan of such a feature... I think one of the first step would be to select candidate open-source (or not, as long as they are easy to communicate with) task management systems, that we could study and compare.

[kkremitzki]

I agree this shouldn't be Arch-specific. Of course there si the BCF format which is interesting, but ideally if we have a good, generic system, it shouldn't be too hard to make it output BCF code when needed.

So we could prepare a plan of such a feature... I think one of the first step would be to select candidate open-source (or not, as long as they are easy to communicate with) task management systems, that we could study and compare.

TaskWarrior (https://taskwarrior.org/) is an extremely powerful, MIT-licensed task management system. It has a strong ecosystem of tools, a DOM API, JSON import/export, can be ran in a client-server architecture for syncing, or authentication & authorization for changes, has a hooks scripting API, and has strong user-defined attribute support.

A hand-rolled neo4j graph database be pretty interesting but this might also be nice, because it would make the whole review/comment/task system only a dependency on an external binary that takes care of all that. Then, FreeCAD would only need a minimal Python interface to interact with the task binary.

[vejmarie]

@vejmarie was busy with something similar... Don't know if it is added to the FreeCAD source...
see: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 10#p147764

I didn't had the time to push anything yet, still trying to improve the VBO implementation and I think it shall be ok pretty soon, meaning I will have the time to work on that stuff pretty soon. I have a todo which is exploding