In the case of the misspelled subwoofer dragging the subwoofer shape from the Visio stencil would only get you the product choices that were spelled correctly. It all worked as expected as long as your data was perfect.

If the user was dragging a product from the Product Editor or PDM (as it was called back then), then the software would use the same filter criteria and find a shape where the stencil named = Speakers and the shape name = subwoofer and drop the appropriate shape.Īll good until someone spells subwoofer as sub-woofer or sub or woofer or anything that is not spelled exactly “subwoofer”. If the user dragged out the Visio shape named “subwoofer” the software would use the category/subcategory as a filter so the user was just presented with product choices of Speakers/Subwoofers instead of the entire product catalog. A subwoofer is a subcategory/type of the Speakers category.

For example take a product like a subwoofer. Basically the category had to equal the Visio stencil name and the Visio shape name had to equal the subcategory/type. If memory serves we shipped with about a dozen categories that easily covered the product needs of our customers.īack then we had some simple, hard coded rules for shape and category assignment. At that time it was mostly AV oriented and did not need a lot of product categories.

In 1998 when D-Tools was first introduced its target market was the residential electronics installation industry.

Speaker visio stencil