About the Property Set tab

The Property Set tab of the Interface Extension designer is for defining a set of custom properties to be used by the interface extension. These properties will be created in the Meridian Enterprise vault when the extension is registered with Configurator. You can write to and read from these properties using your code within the event procedures you extend, as well as assigning property validation and value assignment rules in Configurator.

Every vault contains default sets of built-in properties that are used internally by Meridian Enterprise. These properties should be considered read-only. In addition, an empty property set named Custom is created by default to contain properties defined in the Configurator.

Note    The properties you create in an interface extension are in addition to the properties that can be created with the Configurator. Except for the ability to bind an interface extension property to a different property set, there is no advantage to defining properties in an interface extension. All of the other property characteristics can be defined using either method. The disadvantage to defining properties in an interface extension is that the property definitions can only be modified with Visual Basic and not with Configurator. For these reasons, we recommend making all new vault configurations with properties defined in Configurator.

Each property set should be used for a distinct purpose, for example, vendor data properties or title block properties. You can define as many different property sets as you need by adding another instance of the Interface Extension designer for each property set. Each property set can contain any number of properties.

Warning    When changing an existing interface extension project, you should not modify or remove property definitions from the property set. This is because the property definitions already exist in the vault from when the extension was first registered and they cannot be changed once registered; they can only be deleted. Changing or removing property definitions in a registered interface extension would invalidate the existing property definitions in the vault. However, it is safe to add new property definitions to the interface extension.

The property set defined in each instance of the Interface Extension designer will be used as the default property set for that interface extension. It can be used with either manual (your code) or automatic (Visual Basic form) data binding.

Note    The Enable binding to other property sets option will allow data binding to any property set. However, this option is not recommended because of the performance impact.

Related information

Creating a property set

Creating a property definition

About manual vs. automatic data binding