Skip to end of metadata
Go to start of metadata

Objects have a name, a type, possibly some children and one or more parents. However, this is often not enough. Thus, in arKItect objects can also have attributes. But as is the case with type rules, attributes are defined for a given parent type. Each type can have zero, one or several defined attributes.

Below, you can seen an Enumeration attribute called Component Type.

Uniqueness

As is the case with types, attribute names are unique: two different attributes must thus have different names. You should note that:

  • While attached to a type, attributes are not defined within the type, they remain defined at the project level.
  • The same attribute can be used by several types.
  • Attributes are not transitive, a type does not inherit attributes from either its parents or children.

Attribute Types and Values

Attributes are given an attribute type (text, number, date, etc), for more information see Available Attribute Types. Each object instance can be assigned an attribute value corresponding to the type of the attribute.

Icon

A precision on the arKItect vocabulary: in Rules, we have type attributes that are also simply called attributes. Each of these attributes has been given a name and a type; the available attribute types include, for instance, boolean, text, number and date.

In the project data, objects have instances of these type attributes (these instances are also often called attributes for short). The instances can be assigned values; for instance a type attribute called Performance of type text could be assigned a value 100 °C (the attribute instance parent could be for example an object called Heating System of type System).

Default Value

A type attribute can have a default value. If two object types use the same attribute, they will have the same default value. However, default values will only be applied to newly created objects.

If an attribute has a default value, it can be configured to force all the future instances of the attribute to keep the default value, forbidding the use of overriding individual values (for more information see Type Attribute Properties).

There are some special cases concerning default values:

  • Object as Attribute, where the attribute has a specific object type as its value, cannot have a default value.
  • The default value of an Enumeration attribute is one of its enumerators, so you must define at least one enumerator before setting the default value of an Enumeration attribute.
  • The default value of a Date attribute can be set to the creation date of the instances.

Visibility in Diagrams

Attribute values are by default shown in the Internal Block Diagram but their name or icon (or both) or even everything concerning the attribute (including its value) can be hidden. See Type Attribute Properties for more information.

 

 

The following pages will show you how to work with type attributes:

 

  • No labels