Some ideas I had for improvements

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6 years 9 months ago #284 by wesleyb
Hello! First I want to thank you for developing this tool, as I have only used it a few times and it is already proven to be extremely useful and easy to use.

Right now I am using it to mostly diagram purposes for a large building, mapping processes and flows that are in a typical space (residential apartments, commercial space, restaurant, etc.) I probably won't get to calculations as I don't have values for most of the flows, but it is super useful as a visual tool to come up with relationships, flow loops, etc. As such I easily have a few hundred flows and probably around 50 processes. So I have come up with some things that I have run into that would be really useful to have.

- It would be really useful to be able to select a process, and be able to hide it and all its connected flows, or perhaps the opposite, and hide all other things except the flows and processes it is directly connected to. That way if I wanted to show someone the electric system connections i can easily do that and not have to sort through the hundreds of process lines going everywhere.

-It was mentioned here before, but being able to select multiple flows/processes (which you can do) and modifying their properties such as colour (which it can't do) would be such a time saver.

-Being able to pan around the design space (the main field with the grid and where you make the diagram) using the middle mouse button, or by holding shift or something. As it is scrolling just pans up and down, and not side to side.

-an automatic naming system where it basically concatenates the two processes/inputs/outputs that a flow connects. Like for example the waste water stream between the "kitchen" and "sewer" would be " kitchen - sewer" or something to that effect.

-I may be doing it wrong, but being able to bus flows to multiple things in an organized manner. For example I have electricity input into my building, and I want it to go to the different space types (which I modeled as processes with sub-processes inside them). Each space types need it, but the import flow arrow can only connect to one thing directly, or at least I haven't figured out how to do it. As a work around I just have a small process block that acts as a bus that the input/output directly connects to, then splits off to the other processes. If there was a tool that you could just create a line bus (similar to electric circuit diagrams perhaps) and then you could connect "regular" flows from that to other processes as normal.

Again thanks for developing an awesome tool, and making it free to use. It is a life saver.

Cheers,
Wes

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6 years 9 months ago #285 by adminST
Thanks for the flowers! :)
Thanks also for your suggestions to improve STAN. I put them on our wish list.

Concerning you last point: You solved the issue correctly. In the methodology of material flow analysis a process is needed wherever something happens to materials. Thus, the splitting of an input stream has to be modelled by a process.

All the best,
Oliver

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