Naming groups sequentially

SketchUp Feature Requests
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Continuing the discussion from Orbit, xray, general crappy service:

About the sequential naming of Groups (eg. Group#1,Group#2 etc.) automatically, I do think it will add some comfort.
Sometimes you do not feel like naming directly. If you see some order in the created mess, this will help a bit.

What would help even more is that the groups (or components, for that matter) created get the owner’s name (Sign In name) or a adjustable prefix…

off course, a user would have the possibility to control that.

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It may help but you’ll still end up with something like dish this:

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And don’t expect too much, unless you have a good memory

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Bon apetit! It helps to know how many (to go) and to get some order in the dishwasher/outliner(?)
There will always be something left…

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I’d rather have them all called just “Group”. It’s less visually noisy. If I want to differentiate them I give them actual descriptive name.

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Group definitions do actually get named “Group#1”, “Group#2” etc
But they are not displayed in the UI…
It could be - rather than “Group” for them all…
Their Instances are not named.

To see this a simple one-liner:

Sketchup.active_model.definitions.find_all{|d|d.group?}.each{|g|p g.name}

To rename those groups’ instances you could use something like:

Sketchup.active_model.definitions.find_all{|d|d.group?}.each{|g|g.instances.each{|i|i.name=g.name if i.name.empty?}}

So now in the Outliner the group’s definition-name is displayed as its instance-name, unless already set…

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I would like the option to enable a naming prompt for groups in preferences.

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If you work with Entity Info open [always recommended anyway] then as soon as you make a group it remains selected and you can add the name under the Instance entry, otherwise it remains unnamed, so that way you avoid an extra pop-up dialog and can get either option each time.

Having said that… some way to set/reset a group’s axes would be useful too, as happens with Component creation dialog…

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I hope it is clear to everyone that there is a difference between the Group’s definition name (which is assigned sequentially as Groups are created and cannot be edited) and a Group instance’s name (which is today assigned afterward via Entity Info and is then displayed in the Outliner and Entity Info).

The only benefit I can see to displaying the sequential Group definition names in the Outliner or Entity Info is to let you see that you have (or have not) made copies of Groups. Other than that, the sequence numbers have no useful semantic value. Quick, was Group#134 the railing, or was that Group#135?

On the other hand, though, it seems that displaying them would do no significant harm vs the existing ambiguously uniform “Group” in Outliner or complete absence in Entity Info.

I agree with @TIG that if you want to name Group instances there is an existing mechanism so a new preference and dialog aren’t necessary. I also agree that there are various differences between Groups and Components that are mainly historical since Groups have for some time been implemented as a special case of Components. Axes are a good example. These seemingly arbitrary variations have no basis in the real differences between Groups and Components and are a source of confusion to newbies.

There are also aspects that should stay different, as they serve a valuable purpose. The exclusion of Groups from the Component window, with corresponding elimination of thumbnails reduces file size and gives a tremendous performance boost to extensions that generate a lot of Groups .

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