Creating a new component/connection Type or Type Group

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Creating a new Type

Component and connection types are mainly used for classification purposes. You can use types as filters when viewing your architecture. For instance, instead of viewing the whole thing, you could view just Application components.

To create a new component/connection Type

Note

To add types or type groups in an ABACUS project the user requires Configurer access. Please contact your local ABACUS Administrator if you require this capability.

1.Expand the Types branch of the tree.

2.Right-click on Component Types (or Connection Types).

3.Select Add Component Type (or Add Connection Type) or Create Group.

Tip

Once you've created a type, you should change its icon (see below) and add properties and standards to it for the component or connection instances to 'inherit'.

To change icon for a component/connection Type

Note

To change the icons for types in an ABACUS project the user requires Configurer access. Please contact your local ABACUS Administrator if you require this capability.

1.Right-click on the Component Type (or Connection Type) you wish to change the icon for.

2.Select Change Icon.

3.In the Select Icon dialog browse to a location and choose an image file and click Open.

Note

You can have a custom icon image of any size but it will be sampled at 64x64 pixels and scaled according to your DPI settings to fit to a 'square' in the Explorer Window. So if your original custom icon image is not of equal height and width your Explorer Window icon will be stretched. You should also be careful about not having coloured 'pixels' going all the way to the border of the custom icon image as it will look poor in the Explorer Window with adjacent icons 'bleeding' into each other. Accordingly, you should leave at least a 1 pixel white border.

Tip

You can make your custom icon image an .ico, .bmp, .gif, .jpg or .png format file but due to a limitation in Windows only .ico format will preview in the ABACUS Select Icon dialog if you have the View Menu option set to anything other than Thumbnails.