Needs to be more friendly

[FlailAway]

Hi, just trying the DD (0.76) and really like the concept compared to the Spreadsheet, but I feel that DD is too rigid at the moment. You are probably testing things in the way you have progammed the Object to expect them and not as other humans might enter them. :)

If I create a Length variable with a Hyphen ("-") in the Name and a Value of "6.00 mm", it will accept it converting the all Hyphens to Underscores OK, but the value will be saved as "0.00".

Same applies to using numbers in the Name even if I use an Underscore instead of a Hyphen. e.g. "hex_6.6"

Similar also applies to Values if they are not exactly formatted. e.g. "6mm" for a Length should be adjusted to "6.00 mm" but it gets saved as "0.00 mm". Same problem with "6.0 mm" it gets saved as "0.00 mm"

I know I should be using the full defined/expected Value, but computers are here to do our bidding and not the other way around. The programmer has to spend the time so that the user does not have to. :)

[mwganson]

Hi. Thank you for your feedback. I just noticed the issue today. For some reason I don't get email notifications for these.

A name can only contain alpha numeric characters and underscores, thus . and - are not allowed. Such characters as - and . might be misinterpreted in functions to mean minus and a decimal separator. You can create dynamic properties via the Gui in recent developer builds (0.19). The same limitation applies there, as well. To do this, right click in the property view and select show all. Then right click again on a property and choose the add property option. Rather than disallow these names DD automatically converts to underscores.

I've made an update (now version 1.81) to address the issue of some property values being set to 0.0. There was a bug that was causing it to set the wrong property if the given property name already existed.