Feature Requests
Andrew Hopp Custom Properties: Drop Down Items - Allow Reordering or Sorting
It would probably be a good idea to have ability to move drop down items to arrange as needed and possibly add a sort option. By default any new items a user may add will end up at the end of the list. This is problematic if needing to add new conditions and not being able to group them together with like items that make logical sense.
Totally agree
Good idea! This is on the list.🙂
Piggy backing on the sort/reorder functionality.
Can we also have ability to rename the custom property after it has already been created? I noticed that once you create a custom property you cannot edit the name. Depending on what you pick for "Applies To" automatically pulls in your custom property, I was figuring they were dynamic and having it renamed wouldn't break any linking or inheritance but instead just update the name.
Thanks for all the input here. Regarding renaming or changing the "type" of the property, we are planning to add these abilities. We just need a few extra guard rails in place to avoid data corruption since the user may have a bunch of existing data with the previous property type. For example, if a user changes a property from "Text" to "Dropdown" or from "Text" to "Number" some of the values may not be compatible, so we just need some safety precautions in place.
If you rename a property here, would you expect it to rename on all your existing templates, or just leave them as they are? Also, it could possibly be in use on a bunch of existing projects (and in some formulas). We just have to be cautious to not break stuff.
For the renaming (assuming that you wouldn't be able to change the type), I would expect it to act globally and update across the software in all locations/projects/templates/takeoffs to just update the name only. This would also be assuming that when you goto rename it doesn't allow you to rename to something that already exists. I believe you already have it setup to not allow that, but I didn't test out all aspects of it other than getting some errors where it said I couldn't rename to one of the existing system properties (like "Wall Height").
I did also notice what you mentioned about not being able to edit the type of the property and that does make sense based on all of the existing data like you mentioned and risk of there being some incompatibility to existing templates/takeoffs.
Side note - I played around with deleting a custom property that I new I had in place in a test takeoff and it was good to see that it didn't just wipe it from the takeoff but instead re-categorized that existing property and its value under "Additional" instead of "Custom Property". It also made sense that the property changed to just a basic text type of variable so as just to retain the existing value as a last ditch failsafe to not completely bork anything that is in existing projects/takeoffs.