[Smtk-developers] Associating entities vs adding items

[David Thompson]

Hi all,

Yumin and I were discussing CMBv4 and Yumin mentioned that while attributes can indicate the type of entities they may be associated with, there is no way to describe limits on the number of entities (e.g., a subtract operator may support only a single workpiece at a time, but the GUI cannot infer that too many models are selected for the subtract operator).

One way we might accommodate storing extra information about associations is to ditch the way associations are currently stored and create a special ModelEntityItem that is marked as the attribute's associations. Instead of

  <AttDef ... Associations="m">
   <ItemDefinitions>
     ...
   </ItemDefinition>
  </AttDef>

we would have

  <AttDef ... Associations="itemName">
   <ItemDefinitions>
     <ModelEntity Name="itemName" .../>
     ...
   </ItemDefinition>
  </AttDef>


	Any opinions?
	David