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Opening an item used to render its STEP file in the browser — downloading the geometry, tessellating it through OpenCascade compiled to WebAssembly and computing every solid's edges — only to end up with a still picture nobody could rotate. It ran again on every item, for every person, and on machines running the server alongside their CAD it was enough to bog the whole thing down.
The CAD macro now takes one picture at upload time, on the machine that already has the model open, and the browser just shows it. The app is 7.8 MB smaller, most of it the WebAssembly binary every browser had to fetch and compile.
Also here: deleting an item or a project now clears the files it leaves behind in storage, and a warning appears before a STEP export that is going to take minutes.
Changed
- The 3D preview is now a picture taken by the CAD macro, not a STEP rendered in your browser. Opening an item used to download its STEP file, parse it with OpenCascade compiled to WebAssembly, tessellate every surface and compute the edges of every solid — all to produce a still image: there was never anything to rotate or drag. That work was repeated on every item, for every user, on top of a 7.6 MB WebAssembly binary each browser had to download and compile. It also did not scale with the STEP file's size but with the model's complexity, so a 40 kB part full of fillets could bring a machine to a crawl. The macros now save a PNG of the model at upload time and send it along; the browser just shows it. The published app is 7.8 MB smaller.
- The STEP file itself is unchanged — still exported, still uploaded, still there to download. It simply no longer drives the display.
- Deleting the STEP also deletes its picture. The screenshot exists only to depict that model, so leaving it behind would fill the store with images nothing shows and nothing can trace back to a model.
- The model picture is taken on a plain dark background, so every item's preview looks the same regardless of what each person has their CAD viewport set to. Dark grey rather than black, because all three programs draw the model's edges in a dark colour and a black background would swallow the part's outline. SolidWorks and Inventor use the same grey; FreeCAD only accepts named backgrounds for a screenshot, so it writes a transparent one and the model sits on the panel behind it, which keeps the edges visible on a light and a dark theme alike. In Inventor the colour is an argument of the screenshot call, so nothing outside it is touched; in SolidWorks it is a system setting, so the macro saves the background mode and its three colours, switches them for the capture and puts them straight back — before the upload, and also when the export fails, so a bad run never leaves you working on the wrong background. The mode matters: with SolidWorks set to use the document's scene background, which is the common default, the colours are ignored entirely and the capture comes out on whatever the person happens to be working on.
- A warning appears under the "export STEP" option for models over 10 MB. That export runs in your CAD program before anything is sent, and at that size it can take minutes with the program busy throughout — worth knowing before confirming the window, not after.
Fixed
- Deleting an item completely now also removes its client-verification files. Everything else it owns — the CAD file, the drawing, the PDF, the STEP, the preview picture and any ordinary attachment — was already deleted from storage, but files attached to a client verification were not: their rows vanished with the item while the files stayed behind, with nothing left to find them by.
- Deleting a project now also removes the project's own attachments (the offer and order files) from storage, for the same reason. Items are unaffected: deleting a project does not delete them, it only detaches them, so their files stay in use.
Removed
- STEP, IGES and STL files are no longer previewable in the browser, in the item box or in the attachment preview window; they get a download button. Items uploaded before this version keep their STEP and show no preview until they are sent up again — there is no renderer left to fall back to, which is the point: keeping one would have meant keeping the 7.6 MB dependency for everybody.