>How would the dialog establish the order? Would the order be significant >to some action? If so, there should be a way to manipulate order from >the GUI. >
As far as I can see, the only way for a program to distinguish between two attributes with the same name, attached to the same symbol is by the order that they appear in the symbol's attribute list. This is defined by the order in which they were attached to the symbol originally, or the order that they appear in the symbol file. As far as I know, none of the use cases that people have mentioned assign any meaning to the order in which the symbols appear in the list. It's possible for someone to write a script or netlister that does assign some meaning, but it doesn't seem like a good idea. Better to give different names to the attributes, like slotdef-A slotdef-B, etc. and have the code search for any attribute names beginning with "slotdef-". There _is_ a meaning to the order if a netlister expects only one attribute, but the symbol has several of the same name. In that case, the netlister could find either the first attribute of that name or the last, depending on how the netlister was written. About overloading: Sometimes it's desirable to overload attributes; for example I might want to simulate a circuit through a spice netlister, then generate a BOM of the parts in the simulation. Having the BOM netlister use the same "value" attributes as the simulation helps prevent errors in keeping the two flows in sync. To give the user the choice of overloading the symbols or not, each netlister could first look for a netlister-specific attribute, and if that doesn't exist then use a generic attribute. i.e first look for "spice-sdb-value", and if that doesn't exist then use the generic "value". _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user