Locking DC from alteration.
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Does anyone know if it is possible to lock access to the attributes of a dynamic component so that they cannot be viewed or altered?
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Nope, not possible. Any Pro user will be able to edit and view the inner workings of your component. Free users will not though.
Chris
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Thanks Chris.
I thought that might be the case.
I have a contact who manufacturers 'custom' products and he was considering creating his products in SU Dynamic components, so his customers could use Sketchup to lay them out in their own designs, alter permissable attributes and order automatically. But unless he can somehow protect them he is concerned that his competitors could copy them and simply change some of his attributes for theirs (code, description etc) and create their own after he did all the work.
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Yes, people overly worry about that. Those pesky competitors never have any morals.
It seems to me thats its more trouble to figure out how someone elses component and then steal the good bits from the functions and put them tino my own DC's. But what do I know....
Chris
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And another question is, will you deny the customers the convenience of DC components of the products on the basis that someone might abuse?
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@thomthom said:
And another question is, will you deny the customers the convenience of DC components of the products on the basis that someone might abuse?
The company in question manufactures products made from panels (desks, cabinets etc) and that is a very competitive market.
They have a large number of items (over 2000) that they manufacture.This type of manufacturer normally sell their products through retailers such as design studios and historically the designers have had to have experienced CAD staff or purchase planning software such as Planit, 20/20, Articad etc, and these design packages have all the models of the manufacturers products in 3D formats unique to their own software package and they cannot be exported to other formats.
The design packages are very expensive for the end user, and it also costs the manufacturer a lot of money to have their products put into a catalogue for the software - even more so if they have to have it in various software packages to satisfy all their retailers who have different software packages.
With the introduction of the new features for SU7, it would now be possible for the manufacturers to create their own components with attributes such as Code, description, cost price, selling price etc all included. Although these features were possible before, it required a knowledge of Ruby or the purchase of other add-ons by them and their customers (such as RP Reports which is not cheap).
With the amount of work that a manufacturer would have to put in to create their catalogue of components, a lot of them would welcome the availability of another manufacturers catalogue which could be adapted for their products a lot quicker (hence at much lower investment) - so my contacts concern is, to a degree, understandable.
If it was a feature that components could be locked for modification by third parties, there are a large number of this type of manufacturer who could well be attracted to SU as their preferred system for planning/room design, particularly as the unit cost of the Pro version is very low compared to alternatives. I thought this may be possible somehow, because with RPreports it appears that they have a way of adding Attributes to components which are only accessible by other users of RPreports.
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I see.
I'm not sure that it'd would be less work to use an existing component though. You would have to know how the existing component worked before you adapt it. What kind of products are we talking about anyway? I think the concert is more valid when the components require more complex formulas. If it's mostly selecting predefines dimensions and/or repeatability I find it hard that it'd be any time to save on using an existing component as the formulas are so simple.
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@thomthom said:
If it's mostly selecting predefines dimensions and/or repeatability I find it hard that it'd be any time to save on using an existing component as the formulas are so simple.
The components are quite 'simple' (mostly cube shapes such as cabinet sides, table tops, shelves, etc).
However as there are so many, the time saved would be significant.
For example I created one component to show him how it worked and it took me about 16 minutes to compile the drawing and add the attributes.
I took the same component and created a second 'copy' and changed the attributes and it took about a minute, saving 15 minutes. 15 minutes x 2000 is 30,000 minutes,or 500 hours. Even at a low £10/hr ($18)in-house cost thats a saving of £5000 without considering the time of any learning curve for the person doing the modelling. (In reality the saving would be a lot more than that.)
Anyway, he feels dis-inclined to take the chance, and no matter what others feel regarding his view, in the commercial world (in my experience of dealing with a lot of similar companies) he would not be alone in his attitude. Which is a shame because I think with all that it has going for it, SU is an ideal tool for this type of manufacturer and it's customers.
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Too bad. Would be nice if more industries picked up SU to present their products.
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@thomthom said:
Too bad. Would be nice if more industries picked up SU to present their products.
I agree. But it is up to Sketchup where they feel their market is.
I am not sure of Sketchups long term objective for the software, but if they were interested in the commercial market I think they would have taken more notice of the contents of these (and other) forums, and got more involved in some of the discussions - particularly those covering suggested development of the software.
Personally I see SU as a great tool for those with little or no experience of CAD, and with the introduction of some of the new features of SU7 I am now investigating the possibility of putting together a whole project to support and develop my business aimed at a particular sector of the DIY and small tradesman markets. Part of this project will include a series of Tutorials, components and Ruby Scripts for Sketchup.
I am by no means a SU guru, but over the last few weeks have picked up enough to be able to put my project together.I still have a lot of work to do on it, but hopefully we'll get there
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Just to add my 2p, you could always take credit for your components (click the middle button in the bottom left corner.) As credit can never be removed any customer would be able to check where their components were coming from, although this wouldnt help with competitors taking the models and just hoping people were to lazy to check.
Saying that, youd be able to check yourself and then send angry letters to those who stole your models.
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@remus said:
.... you could always take credit for your components
I've seen that on some models.
How do you set the author, is that a function of uploading to 3D warehouse, or can it be done for any model shared in other ways?
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When youve got SU7 open, click the middle circle in the bottom left corner of the SU window. Youll need to be logged in to do it btw (the right most circle in the bottom left hand corner.)
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Thanks Remus.
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I've found that the credit system is very easy to get around. It basically relies on simply embedding an unedited version of the original in a new model.
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Unless your DC (or even better; it's nested parts) are also credited.
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One other (nerdy) option I'll throw into the suggestion pile:
Whenever a DC's attributes are edited by a pro user via the component attributes window, we timestamp that interaction via an attribute called dynamic_attributes._lastmodified. If you are a Ruby coder (or want to hire one from the Ruby forum), you could create a "Generate Purchase Order from Drawing" script that not only creates the order form for the panel manufacturer based on the configured DCs, but also checks to see that the timestamp attached to each DC is identical to the "official" version. If someone modified your DCs, you could at least tell that this had occurred.
Please keep us informed of these kinds of objections from your manufacturer clients! We are very aware that there will be some companies that dislike the idea of sharing their "secret configuration sauce" with the pro users, but our assumption is that there will be some middle ground where there could be DCs that are "configurable enough" to share with sales-level people without giving away the manufacturing process. (For example, would your client be more interested in SketchUp as a sales platform if the DCs they released didn't show every drilled hole but only showed gross geometry?)
Anyway, I'm very interested in feedback like this -- we are listening!
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Scott,
Nice to hear from 'the source'.I have been involved with a large number of Kitchen manufacturers and their customers for some time, and attitudes in the 'commercial sector' never cease to surprise me.
The problem is that a lot of the manufacturers have no in-house software expertise, have little IT savy and are not interested in spending money with 3rd parties to 'help' the retailer sell their products, they expect the retailer to find the resources to promote/sell.
This has made it possible for other software providers to make money from two avenues - the sale of their software and the sale of catalogues of particular manufacturers products. And these are not cheap.
From my experience I think that there is a vast potential for Sketchup in this market (as well as other similar markets), but to exploit it would involve investing time (and hence capital) in developing the necessary tools (such as libraries of components correctly configured). With no potential for software revenue, the only way to recoup this capital investment would be for the library developer to charge either manufacturers (unlikely) or their customers a nominal fee for the libraries, but with no real 'protection' system available for them to prevent the libraries being freely passed around - there would be few, if any, people prepared to do it.
This is a shame, because for the sake of an optional facility for the 'locking' of access to DC attributes everyone loses out - the retailer, the manufacturer and Sketchup. But I guess the addition of such a feature is no trivial matter.
With regard to the amount of detail in the DC, the two main markets for a 'planning system' are.
- The large national/international Manufacturers,
- The small self build studios.
The large cabinet manufacturers would not be interested in having a high level of detail (such as drilling positions etc) as they have their own in-house production systems for taking orders through the manufacturing process. They are not even interested in recieving drawings from the retailer (in most cases). What they are interested in is having an electronic order listing the codes of their products.
Their retailers are also not interested in the assembly detail, what they need is a realistic accurately sized model (usually fixed sizes as manufaturers in the main only make fixed sizes) that allows them to accurately lay out the plan that looks good to impress the customer. They also need a quick and easy way of 'costing' out the layout to quote the customer, and also list their costs to monitor the profit. (Having the 'cost' prices in the DC to facilitate the latter is another reason for reluctance to share them freely in the market). Finally they want an order for the manufacturer.The small self build studios are a different market with different needs. They want the flexibility of parametric re-sizing of cabinets to suit the customers room layout (now possible with DC), they would want cutting lists if they make their own cabinets as opposed to buying them in, and they may also want a much higher level of detail for manufacture (such as shelf and door hole positions etc.)
Over the next few weeks, for my own purposes, I will be intially looking at ways to use Sketchup to offer solutions in the latter of these two markets which will include specially targeted training material as a large part of this market has little or no 'CAD' experience.
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