It is nice to finally use BSA’s modeling capabilities on projects myself. I actually use it to reverse engineer a large PLC project written in Siemens SCL, as well as using it on BSA. Commercial tools in acceptable price range simply don’t have the precentation capabilities that I need + using BSA myself I also…
At one point I implemented a “document” – basically a tree with all the content in the diagrams and details about each object. You can see an example at left below. As the project grows, so does this tree and the full tree start to take time loading as this is based on a standard…
The tree with HMI objects became a bit wide so i changed it to become a tree on several levels. It works by inserting a connection point and drawing inheritance lines from that, but this one will need some re-thinking because I ended up fiddling far to much with lines to get it look nice.…
I changed the table editors to support inline editing. Added a checkbox to each row so users can select rows and execute delete, move Up, Move Down etc. Editing in the table directly is nice because the property editor becomes a bit messy if you expand to much in the tree.
Once we have a functional UML/ERD Tool it is vey easy to move on to HMI and automate creation of HMI as illustrated below. As you create large models it becomes a bit of work to maintain HMI associated with the model and this can easely be created and maintained automatically inside BSA. The result…
Usually then I work on standard languages I use GIT or GitHub etc where you have an issue list associated with GIT. I want the same integrated into BSA so that I can automatically populate the list with errors as well as add manual entries. Such a list is very easy to make using WPF…
Just the color conversion + a few details left and I have achieved the first part to print diagrams. What you see below is the top of a preview. Color conversion is an issue because as we design on dark theam the colors might not be great for a white paper background. To deal with…
In this example I loaded an existing diagram and intend to print it using the “Print Page” tool. PrintPage allows me to draw a rectangle on screen of what I want out as a page. I used this on an earlier CASE tool and it proved to be very valuable. The process of printing an…
I use a Canvas as background for the diagrams and as I print I just provide a different Canvas using the same functions to draw on screen and paper. To zoom per page I just do the following – an example to zoom to 50%. The second part is to just draw the symbols using…
This shows 3 diagrams with circles being printed. I have only modified the Ellipse symbol to support printing so far and it works well with a few comments. (1) Colors on the symbol need a white paper version. (2) printing is 1:1 in size, I need to zoom and I have a path, but I…