Problems with the Active Body highlight color.

[NormandC]

Another suggestion: automatically expand the content of a Body when we create it or activate it. It would make sense for two reasons: you almost always want to see the content of a Body you are working on (at least I do, and having to manually expand it every time is an annoyance); plus, upon creation/activation, it is still selected, so there is no visual cue that it was just activated. With the expanding of its content, with said content highlighted, this would improve noticeability.

Corollary suggestion: when deactivating a Body, collapse its content?

In both cases, it may be judicious to provide the option to disable this behavior.

[chrisb]

Another possibility would be to modify the body's symbolin the same as the Tip. Of course it could be something different but
- the symbol and the technique of showing it is readily available
- The Tip can well be seen as the active element inside the body; so it's not a semantic cut.

[NormandC]

I've thought about it too, but the problem is that such a tiny symbol overlaid on the regular Body icon would not be as easily noticeable. It is obvious from a recent topic that it really needs to be unmissable.

[sliptonic]

I like the idea. There might be some initial confusion since it looks vaguely like a multi-selection but that's nothing. it'll only take the user a few seconds to realize that isn't the case.

[wmayer]

But how are we to know how to enable it? There is nothing in BaseApp/Preferences/View about Active Body label font style. Do we need to create it from scratch, and if so, what name and value to give it?

Yes, you have to create the keys from scratch: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/blob ... .cpp#L1304

How about propagating the active highlight color to the Body's content? With all of it having the highlight color, it would be more noticeable.

This will cause other problems. The tree view doesn't know what a body or part container is, instead it gets a signal from the document if an object has been activated to render this is in a special mode.
Now it's possible that you have a Part container containing several bodies and following your logic you must show all child objects inside the part container with the purple background when you activate it. So, this means that also the child objects of an inactive body is rendered with this background color.

[wmayer]

With git commit 34a0c7bce the activated object (body, part container, ...) is now in bold text.

[chrisb]

Thank you!

[NormandC]

Thanks.

This will cause other problems. The tree view doesn't know what a body or part container is, instead it gets a signal from the document if an object has been activated to render this is in a special mode.
Now it's possible that you have a Part container containing several bodies and following your logic you must show all child objects inside the part container with the purple background when you activate it. So, this means that also the child objects of an inactive body is rendered with this background color.

That's unfortunate. It's always trickier than we non-programmer think, isn't it.

The new behaviour (bold text, automatic expand/collapse) will hopefully be enough.

[AIMEDSOLUTIONS]

Hi Guys
An example from another software. Its an assembly file.

assynx.PNG (152.52 KiB) Viewed 639 times