Populating Component Options on a Global Basis

[jarvis393]

I am trying to build a library of cabinets for the products my cabinet shop produces.

I am just now learning the concept of automatically populating attributes of sub-components based upon previously existing attributes of master-components. I have seen this alluded to as Parents & Children.

As I delve further into this I see that the Parent-Child relationships can be additionally parsed based on conditional statements. A custom attribute such as “Cabinet Style” can impact how wide a cabinet door is based on the “Overlay” attribute associated with “Cabinet Style”.

All of this seems simple enough on a cabinet-by-cabinet basis.
The Child-Components attributes are derived from Parent-Component attributes.
The Parent Component attributes are derived from COMPONENT OPTIONS

## MY QUESTION has to do with how the the COMPONENT OPTIONS are populated on a global basis.

In the interests of efficiency and accuracy it would seem best that you key in this initial COMPONENT OPTION value in just one location. A kitchen might have 20 cabines but the CEILING_HEIGHT attribute for the kitchen would usually be the same value for all cabinets.

How do you get this one COMPONENT OPTION value to show up for ALL sub-components?

Put another way: Would the Parent-Component be a KITCHEN that contains every possible cabinet sub-component?

[MikeWayzovski]

There is this way of looking at it :
See your work file, aka the Model, as the ‘Top level’ container of the kitchen.
Create a ‘swatch component’ (some geometry) , call it ‘Global’ and attach appropriate attributes to it (For instance ‘CeilingHeigth’).

Now all Components could reference the Global ‘swatch’ attributes, so to show the same value, all other components could have something like this :
CeilingHeigth = Global!CeilingHeigth
redraw if the value changes