Creating Components

Introduction

The best place to create, updated and delete components is in the structure view.

Structure view

There are two ways to create new components.

  1. Without any relationship to an existing component
  2. As children of an existing component

Creating components without any relationship to an existing component

Press the create button or + on the keyboard.

Create Button

A dialog will pop up asking you to enter a name for the new component and its type.

Create Component Dialog

To create multiple components at once, enter a semicolon separated list of names.

Creating components as children of an existing component

Select an existing component and then press the create button or + on the keyboard.

Create children

A dialog will pop up asking you to enter a name for the new component and its type. The dialog will include a checkbox indicating that the new component should be related to the selected component.

Create Component Dialog

Importing components from a spreadsheet

  1. Switch the structure view to table mode and export the current structure to a spreadhseet in order to create an import template.

Export Button

  1. Insert components into the template sheet and set the component IDs and types as desired.

Spreadsheet Template

Importing from a spreadsheet will update components that already exist in the model. Spreadsheets are a good way to update components in bulk, for example, by setting the type of many components at once using Excel’s drag formula feature.

  1. Save the workbook and drag and drop it onto the app.

Import Spreadsheet

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to import the hierarchical built from relationship between components from a spreadsheet. However, this feature is on the roadmap and will be available sometime in the future.