4 How To:
Projects, Sheets, Controls

To build more complex interactive scenes without loosing the overview you have to give your project a structure. The base concept of sheetbuild to put data in an hierachical order with sheets and subprojects.

Sheets

You can create a new project from the dashboard. The convention is that the first sheet of the project defines the interface to other projects and the end user.

You can not create the interface in other sheets

The input controls in the other sheets are virtual controls which you only can access in the same project via the sheet type. For example we have a set of chairs and a table. you can create the table and a chair in sheets. You can also name these sheets.

In the first sheet, the main sheet, you can then import these sheets via the helper menu.

Now let's create another project we call room. We can here import our furniture set and access the controls of the main sheet. But we are not able to access the other sheets.

The idea behind this is to hide unecessary information which is also a fundamental concept in software development.

Subprojects

When referencing a subproject you can select this project in the editor. It is indicated by the markers,when you hover it. When you select it the user interface updates for the current selected project.
This is also the default behaviour in published projects. To turn it of just set it in the publish settings dialog.

You can also deactivate selection on project level via the property "select" which overwrites the project settings.

When to use what?

When to use sheets and when to use subprojects also dependends from the performance. You should use subprojects only when the scene has more complex objects and need to reuse them from time to time.

But when you use more simple objects, for example a screw, a hundreds of times a sheet is the better option because auf sheetBuilds calculation engine.