Please Bring Back Control Text Boxes

IR_4882010 · ‎Oct 01, 2021

PTC, please bring back the control text boxes, with embedded scripting, that you had in Mathcad 15. For the work we do in power engineering, I found these to be one of the most useful tools in Mathcad. So useful, in fact, that I'm still hanging onto 15.

amcgough · ‎Nov 11, 2021

Hi!

This is something we want to bring back soon and so is an area of functionality that I'm interested in more feedback on. Which controls did you find most useful in Mathcad 15.0? There were a number - checkboxes, list boxes, text boxes, etc. What kind of scripting functionality did you find useful above and beyond what you could do with the use of 'web controls'? That is, what did you do with scripting a control that you found you couldn't do using the setup wizard of the web controls?

Many thanks,

Andy.

IR_4882010 · ‎Nov 11, 2021

As far as controls, we mostly use list boxes and text boxes. With list boxes, the scripting allows us to determine what is in the dropdown list and which item is the default, and the output can be used in other programming in the document. For instance, we might have a graph with a characteristic that varies depending on which region of the country the project is for; we can use a control list box to select a region, and the output from that determines which characteristic is displayed in the graph. With text boxes, the scripting allows us to do some powerful things, such as math calculations using document variables, the result of which can be embedded in text that appears in the text box. Also, the outputs of control text boxes can be mapped over to a table, which we can then export. I'm not familiar with web controls in Prime. Is it a web browser based solution?

Thank you.

Ian

amcgough · ‎Nov 24, 2021

Hi Ian,

Web Controls in Mathcad 15.0 were called web controls as they were introduced to interact with the old Mathcad Application Server, which was a calculation server like application for Mathcad with content that was effectively accessed via HTML - thus the name web control. The MAS didn’t last long but the web controls stayed as you could use them in normal worksheets - they’re similar to scripted controls but with no script - there’s a UI setup that allows you to select variables and values fo variables in the drop down.

If my history of Mathcad is sound, scripted controls were added a log time ago and the majority of users utilized them with default, simple scripts to create drop down controls of different variable names with different variable values as initially they were the only way to do that in Mathcad. However, as they were scripted, there’s a lot more you could do with them to have them interact with the worksheet and many people used them that way too. When web controls were added, a lot of people who only used the basic use case of scripted control migrated to web controls, as they are easier to use and setup (though more limited in functionality ).

Mathcad Prime 7.0 has the equivalent of a web control - the combo-box input control. You can set it up with the simple UI, defining multiple variable names and multiple variable values for those variable names. All web controls in Mathcad 15.0 will convert to the combo-box input control in Mathcad Prime 7.0.

Prime 8.0 is coming out in March next year and the content for that is set. However, Prime 9.0 will be coming out in March 2023 and I am starting up a project fr that release to research how we could add a new scripting environment and associate with new controls. Your feedback above is very useful for that process - so I appreciate the time you took to provide it.

Many thanks,

Andy.