Migration Towards and Optimization of Dimension Constraints

[lahabim]

Hello,

As the world of drafting and modeling shifts inexorably towards constraints as a way to create the figure and geometry that you desire, I think that AutoCAD would do well to shift in this direction. With programs like Inventor, Solidworks, and the like, the emphasis is placed upon fully constraining your geometry. If this could be more integrated into AutoCAD, this would make it much easier to utilize. As it is, the DC controls are particularly clunky (whereas the geometric constraints are quite passable IMHO). 

One such feature that would be nice would be optimization of Dimensional Constraints--that is, that you would be able to change the DC measurement to "min" or "max" to minimize or maximize the dimension selected within the other constrained geometry. This could obviously create a problem if the geometry was otherwise not constrained enough to prohibit the min from extending to 0 or the max to infinity. These would have to be checks done as conditions for it to apply with a similar error message to the "over-constrained" message already part of the program.

For the criteria, perhaps something along the lines of the following criteria could be considered.

if (dcmin >= 0 + (C))

C being some calibration constant set by the  user. (e.g. 1/32, 1/8, or whatever you would like.

and perhaps

if (dcmax <= dim_orig*(1+S))

S being some percentage of the original length (e.g.  3 so the max length would be within the range of 400% of it's original length, once again, set by the user)

Sincerely,

     Stranger