Property Rendering

Property Rendering

Displays a custom property's value inside a text. You type a token where the value should appear, and ARES replaces it — permanently keeping it up to date:

Ligne Prop[Longueur] m        →     Ligne 13,3 m

The rendered text is clean: the token disappears entirely, and nothing but the value is written. What the drawing shows is what a printout, a DWG export or a colleague without ARES will see.

Property Rendering is the third and last piece of the custom-property chain, and it only ever writes text:

Feature	Writes
Custom Properties	the property attachment
Property Calculation	the property value
Property Rendering	the text that displays it

The token

Prop[Name]

Name is the custom property's name, exactly as it appears in the ARES property list — capitalisation does not matter. Type the token anywhere inside a text, alone or surrounded by whatever you like; everything that is not a token is kept verbatim.

Prop[Longueur]                →     13,3
(Prop[Longueur]m)             →     (13,3m)
Ref. Prop[Repere] - Prop[Longueur] m   →   Ref. P12 - 13,3 m

Rules to know:

• Unknown property name → nothing happens. The token stays as plain text and a message appears on the status bar. ARES never displays a blank where it did not understand a name.
• One token per property per text. Using the same property twice in one text is refused (status-bar message, nothing is written).
• Two tokens must be separated by some text. Prop[A]Prop[B] is refused: with nothing between them, ARES could not tell where one value ends and the next begins if you later edit the text by hand.
• All the "decoration" is your text, not the value. The value is written bare, so units, brackets and separators are simply typed around the token.

Linking a text

There are two ways a text becomes linked.

Automatically — if the property named by the token is already attached to that text, ARES links it on its own at the next pass. The attachment is what signals your intent, which is why nothing gets linked by accident.

Manually — for anything else (a standalone text matching no attach rule, or a text written before its property was attached), select the text(s) and run:

macro vba run [ARES]BindPropertyRender

Links each selected text to the properties its tokens name, and renders them once. If a token's property is not attached to the element, ARES says so on the status bar instead of linking — attach the property first (Custom Properties), then run the command again.

When there is no value yet

If the property is empty, the token itself reappears in the text:

Ligne Prop[Longueur] m

That is deliberate: it is a visible reminder that the value is not filled in yet, and it means the link is never lost. As soon as the value is filled, the text renders again on its own.

Editing a rendered text by hand

You can retype a rendered text at any time — add, remove or change anything around a value (before it, after it, in the middle of surrounding wording, on both sides at once), and the link survives. ARES recognises the value it last wrote wherever it sits inside what you typed, and keeps updating it; everything else you typed becomes the text's new permanent wording.

Only touching the value itself is different:

• a value you did not touch keeps its link and goes on updating;
• a value you changed or deleted releases that token — it becomes ordinary text and ARES stops writing there;
• if the text was changed too much to be matched up (for example, the same short value appears twice and ARES cannot tell which occurrence is which), ARES keeps only the Prop[...] tokens still visible in it, drops the rest, and tells you on the status bar.

This is deliberate: retyping the value is the only way to unlink a text on purpose — there is no "unlink" command yet (see Known limitations). Your other properties are never modified: rendering only ever writes text.

A value written by Property Calculation is governed by its rule. Retyping it in the text does not change the property — the next pass writes the computed value back. To change it for good, change the rule or the source.

Locked, protected and out-of-scope cases

• A locked element is never modified (status-bar message).
• Only texts, multi-line texts and cells are handled. Dimensions, notes, tables and tag elements are not: their tokens stay as plain text.
• Inside a cell, only the sub-text you linked is rewritten — the cell's other texts (such as an ATLAS identifier) are left untouched. A rendered sub-text is also excluded from the cell text that Property Calculation's CellText source reads, so a value can never end up feeding on its own display.
• A multi-line text inside a cell used by a CellText rule cannot be linked (status-bar message).
• A rendered value may look exactly like an old Auto Lengths trigger — for example (12.3m) — and that is intended: reproducing that output character for character is what makes converting a drawing a text edit rather than a redraw.

Known limitations

• If the same short value appears more than once in a text, ARES may not tell the occurrences apart. An edit near one of them can then release the link instead of preserving it — rare in practice, but possible with short repeated values.
• A length fed by GroupLength does not refresh on a simple geometry stretch. The value follows when the element is otherwise touched; a coming version handles the pure stretch.
• A linked text that belongs to no graphic group is only refreshed when you touch it. When the value is pushed to it from somewhere else — the source cell of a group, another element's rule — ARES needs the graphic group to reach the text: that is how the value travels, and how the text is found again to be redrawn. A text placed on its own, outside any group, still renders when you link it and whenever it is itself modified, but it will not follow a value changed elsewhere. Put it in the group it displays.
• DWG / V7 round trip, or a save from a station without ARES: the link is lost. The text survives with its last values, clean and readable — but it is frozen, and must be re-linked with BindPropertyRender. This is the price of drawings that carry no visible scaffolding.
• There is no global "re-render everything" or "unlink everything" command yet.

Options panel

macro vba run [ARES]EditPropertyRenderingOptions

Opens the Property Rendering options dialog: the master switch and the two ATLAS label-cell settings.

Configuration variables

Variable	Default	Purpose
ARES_Text_Render	True	Master switch for the feature.
ARES_Update_ATLASCellLabel	True	Rebuild the ATLAS leader-label cell geometry after its text changes, so the frame follows the new text.
ARES_Cell_Is_Label_Name	ETI076|ETI01E|…	Cell names treated as ATLAS labels (| separated).

The last three moved here from the Auto Lengths options panel when that feature was removed: all three drive display, and the ATLAS rebuild is triggered by the renderer's own text write.

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Version française : Rendu des propriétés