Thank everyone for your answers, all very helpful.

@dav_id said:

The only sketchup's extension i knows is that one

with constrains ... but it's an old plugin

-I will take a look at that Driving Dimensions Plugin, thanks for your help Dav_ID!

@ken said:

Not sure this will help but have you tried Profil Builder 3, Assembly Dialog?

Link Preview Image Page not found - Profile Builder 4

favicon

Profile Builder 4 (profilebuilder4sketchup.com)

-That Profile builder looks promising, I haven't seen it before, thank you Ken!

@shawb said:

@andres2688 said:

Hope there is some extension coming soon to solve this issue.

I fear you will be waiting a long time for this! Apart from making the DC Component Attribute panel a bit easier on the eye you will always have to somehow program each element of the DC to do what you want it to do. As the designer (of the DC) only you know how the parts should interact.

AutoCad and Revit were mentioned earlier in the thread. It's probably ten years since I used either of those but do recall that Revit 'Families' (equivalent of DCs) were far more difficult to build than Sketchup DCs but they used a similar syntax/language and method to provide the instructions for making them work. In AutoCad I used Dynamic Blocks which provided constraints but, again, the input required was akin to what you would use in SU DCs. I'm relying on memory to comment here and have not used the Parametric version of AutoCad, maybe there is now something better than I remember!

Rather than a plugin to directly replace the DC Attribute interface, perhaps some form of graphic based workflow would help. Something in Excel maybe? Design the DC logic on another platform before tying your DC in knots within SU!

-Maybe I didn't explain well myself. The tools that I miss from AutoCAD are the ones from the Parametric tab. It allows you to pick a line and set it to be paralell to another one, or just set a rigid dimension on an object that won't change when moved. They seem to be quite intuitive to me, I used to use them a lot. When you mentioned Excel I remember binding a sheet to an AutoCAD drawing in order to change an objects dimensions, that was quite interesting too. I cannot say much about Revit families since I didn't work so much with them, I tried to make a hinge door and it took me long time, it seemed more complicated to me than Sketchup.
Thanks for your time Shawb !

Cheers

@gd3design said:

They recently added the search function to top of asset editor for this reason. You can search both the preset material library and materials in scene. I would like to see more organization for materials, such as grouping. But until then, the search function makes life a lot easier.

Thank you GD3Design for your answer. Yes that group function would be a lot of help.

Cheers