MathCAD Prime 10 Area Collapsing/Expand Using Advanced Controls

[Gary_S1969]

PTC held a webinar on 8/20/2024 called Advanced Controls Crash Course. No questions were taken during the webinar. Instead, attendees were asked to type their questions in the chat area. These questions were then supposed to be answered later. Has anyone seen a list of the questions and answers? Where would one find this information? A question that I had asked was, "Is it possible to expand/collapse areas using the new controls?" I really would like to get an answer. I have searched through the Knowledge Base and it appears it could be done in previous versions using the on-board script editor. MC Prime 10 does not include an on-board script editor. You can only edit the script in a control. Is it possible to see the "code" behind MC areas?

[DJNewman]

Hi Gary,

I was manning the Q&A box during the event! The answers appeared in the same Q&A box. I know they did since I had some back-and-forths with people. through that, as well as I just verified that "Display Answers" was selected in the back-end for the Q&A box.

Let me repeat the answer that we gave to your question:

"Hi Gary, As of now we cannot control the opening and collapsing of area through Advanced Controls. Thank you for joining the webinar."

You also asked another question:

"Can you import content into or delete content from a worksheet using an advanced control?"

Here's how I replied,

"Hi Gary, the short answer is probably "yes", but the actual process for doing so would involve having Advanced Controls activate Mathcad API features, which we show an example of as the last thing in today's webinar with Button. For importing/deleting content specifically, we'd have to investigate exactly what part of the API to use in relation to your needs. If you want to schedule a lengthier and technical conversation with the Mathcad team about this, please click on the connect with a Mathcad expert button on your screen. Thank you for the question!"

I don't know if you took me up on that offer; but it's basically a nice way of saying that we think it's possible, but we've never tried to do it before, so I can't give a 100% certain answer or how to do it.

Edit: I don't want to really share other people's questions / answers because some of those are pretty private / specific / people asking if the replay would be available and if the downloadable worksheets would be there too (which it is and which they are, and in a normal .zip file instead of the goofy workaround I had to do with embedding them in a PowerPoint presentation because our webinar platform doesn't like .zip files as attachments).

@JeffH1 asked some specific JScript coding questions that I didn't expect people would ask about, so the other Mathcad team members had to answer them.

By the way, I have a "post-mortem" call on Thursday this week where I'll discuss all of the questions and survey responses that we got during the event with the team and what we can learn from them. If you want to add some extra feedback here that I can bring up, please feel free to do so.
Also-also, our webinar platform has two modes for communicating with us: the Q&A box (which is private 1:1 communication between an individual audience member and PTC) and a chat feature, which lets all of the audience members (and PTC) all participate in one real-time, public conversation. I didn't enable the chat feature for this event (if you want to know why, it's because I'd have to moderate it for spam or trolls), but if you feel like that's something that would have added to your learning or enjoyment for it, let me know.

[Gary_S1969]

I did not see the answers to the questions during the event. I am not sure if I entered my questions in the "chat" or the "Q&A" area. I may have been monitoring the "chat". Is it possible to enter questions in the "chat" and have them sent to the "Q&A"? I have to plead ignorance on how I missed the answers to the questions - but thank you for sending them. I would like to speak with a MathCAD expert if possible about my issues with using the program. I understand you can schedule a conversation elsewhere on the PTC website? If not, could you provide a link? The issues that we have are that we are using MathCAD to document settings for IEDs that have thousands of settings. Even though, we only use about 20% of the settings capability of the device for most applications, the MathCAD worksheet can get over a hundred pages long. We have tried to solve the problem by using collapsed areas to conceal the settings that we are not using. These settings often have an "on/off" setting that enables subsequent setting points. It would be convenient if the MathCAD worksheet would know that when I turn a certain setting "off" it can collapse the appropriate area(s) containing the "sub" settings. Other settings have numerical values. For example, one setting has a range from 1-32. Extra settings are required dependent on the number you pick. If you set this setting for 10, you need ten sets of additional "sub" settings to program. These are contained in areas (for now) and the ten areas have to be manually expanded while the remaining 22 areas remain collapsed. It would be nice to automate this function. The alternative idea that came to mind during the webinar was could we just have all the "sub" settings in a separate worksheet, and only bring that worksheet into the master MathCAD worksheet if required using Jscript. Likewise, we could have all the "sub" settings in the master MathCAD worksheet and use Jscript to automatically delete those settings that are not used. It appears that MathCAD eliminated the onboard script editor from the program at some point in Prime development. The result seems to be you can use only Combo boxes or Advanced Controls, but you can't write and implement your own Jscript. I assume this is something that MathCAD API can do, but since it is an API it only allows MathCAD to communicate with other non-MathCAD applications, correct? I would be interested in reading the discussion on Jscript that was started during the webinar if that is possible. I don't know if it is appropriate to contact the user who asked the questions directly or not - please advise. Another thing that I noticed yesterday that I would like you to bring up with the team is regarding using internal hyperlinks to within a single MathCAD sheet to jump to various areas in the sheet. This function is very useful for creating a Table of Contents (TOC) at the beginning of one of our setting sheets that allows the user to jump directly to the setting of interest. There are two issues I see with the implementation of this feature. First, if all your text is in text blocks, you can only create a single tag within that block to jump to. That means you have to separate all your text into text boxes, if you need several tags on the same page. Second, there is no easy way to create a "go back to where I was in the TOC" link/tag. If the TOC is in a text block, you can't go back to the exact spot where you were because of the first issue. If the TOC is broken up into text boxes, you have to manually and tediously create a link for each setting to jump back to the exact spot in the TOC. This may be able to be automated with the Advanced Controls, however; I need to check it out. The other question I would have and need to check out is can a certain piece of text have both a tag and a link? I guess I will find out today. Thank you for your prompt response to my initial inquiry. Happy to discuss anything mentioned here further in preparation for you Thursday meeting.

[DJNewman]

Sorry I didn't reply to this sooner (I've been variously on paid leave and will continue to be for the rest of this week!), but I did send your message here to Vipul before the meeting (I didn't get a response from him besides that you provided a lot to read!) and I discussed it during the call. Some of the things you have here ought to be submitted as feature requests.

If you're not already having a Mathcad team follow-up (someone from PTC is supposed to follow up with all of the webinar attendees as a matter of policy), you can escalate it by filling this out: https://www.mathcad.com/en/contact-us

I'm not really sure what you mean about the "onboard script editor"; do you mean something different than the scripts that go with each control?

Ah, and as for "chat" on the webinar, I meant that there was no chat, there was just the Q&A box. But that's water under the bridge now.