Validity status
Important feature of Engineering Report is indication of validity of the content of report items. It means that user is always clearly informed whether the information in the table or picture is up-to-date or not. Validity status is indicated in the Navigator panel and also in Report preview.
Engineering Report distinguish following validity statuses:
invalid = not up-to-date report item. It indicates that the information displayed in Report preview and related to this report item does not reflect current status of the project. This status is indicated by red exclamation mark
waiting for regeneration. it means that this report item is waiting in the queue for regeneration or is just being regenerated. This status is indicated by green color of the icon in the Navigator and green exclamation mark in Report preview
valid = up-to-date report item. It indicates that the information displayed in Report preview and related to this report item does reflect current status of the project. This status has no special indication
Validity status is based on detection of changes in all entities of one type. It means that a table containing beam B1 only will be marked as invalid after changing beam B2. Validity status also detects changes in all properties of project entities, not only in displayed ones. It means that table with beams which does not show e.g. property "Layer" will be marked as invalid after changes in the layers. This implementation ensures that report items marked as valid are always reflecting the current status of the project. Report items marked as invalid can be also valid, but it is not sure.
Validity status is on the safe side.
Validity status of external items
It is possible to insert several external items into Engineering Report (External picture, External text file, External report, ECtools© output). Those external items can be inserted as an external reference (not embedded). In this case the validity status informs whether the source file on hard drive was changed or not. In case the source file is changed the validity status is set to Invalid. During following regeneration the current content of the source file is displayed in Engineering Report (and the item is marked as valid).