Save to Local Drive instead of using Cloud

Feature requests
1

The problem that this feature will solve:

While the Cloud is a great idea, for a business such as ours, where everything must go through GIT (our revision tracking system), including models, the use of Shapr3D cloud creates a case where changes can get lost.

It also makes it problematic when we want to load the previous days work: load? Doesn’t exist. Instead, we have to IMPORT our project.

WORKFLOW

  1. Models, code, etc. is changed per tasks
  2. Models are EXPORTED (because there is no save) to get them onto the local drive (remembering that we also need to set the name as well!)
  3. Models are checked into GIT revision storage system and pushed to our local GIT server (usually done at the end of the day unless there are reasons to do otherwise)
  4. If older model is checked out with GIT, need to IMPORT (again, there is no load)

In all of this unless you have set up the name of the design using the Cloud, the title of the object will be UNNAMED DESIGN.

Brief description of the outcomes that you expect from this feature:

This should allow me to do traditional load and save to local drive so that we can do proper revision tracking. This would also assign a name to the design instead of UNNAMED DESIGN.

By allowing this, we can assure that the designs are correctly tracked and modifications don’t end up where they shouldn’t.

What can’t you achieve without this feature?

I can’t change the name of the file unless I save it to the cloud. As I indicated, this can be a point of failure (we need everything to go through GIT).

Is this a workflow blocker for you? Is this why you can’t use Shapr3D for work? Is this slowing you down?

No, it just makes it weirdly convoluted and introduces a point of failure (should modifications end up on the cloud instead of the local drive). It is also problematic that unless the cloud is used, you are incapable of naming a design for export.

The lack of a standard save/load mechanism may be ideal for Cloud based system, but falls apart should one need standard functionality.

1 Like
2

Another oddity (at least on the macOS desktop version — may apply to all versions), I have turned off SYNC and yet, on weird occasions, it turns it back on. It may be that I accidentally clicked something that was in the cloud, however, that should NOT change my preferences.

To me, this is a bug. Preferences should be the source of truth — my clicking on a cloud object should not change my preferences. Otherwise they cease to be preferences.

3

Are you sure that you turned it off for the same account?

4

This might be a bug indeed and we’d like to investigate what happened. Could you please open a support ticket and describe what you observed when you toggled the Sync state and how that differed from your expectations?

You can do you on your Shapr3D Account Page (https://account.shapr3d.com/) → click on your e-mail in the upper right corner → Open new support ticket.

5

Same account.

What may have occurred is that the item was pulled from the cloud, sync was turned off, then changes occurred. I’m not sure if the code automatically attempts to update the cloud item (thus turning sync back on).

I do not seem to have this issue when I start with a new item and import from the local hard drive (though the name is frustratingly called Unnamed Design).

All assets must go through GIT, so this could, in the future, be problematic from a workflow standpoint. My gut fear is someone EXPORTING Unnamed Design and having two files (one a modified version) for the same asset.

6

Done.

Unfortunately, how it got to that state we cannot tell you — it may have occurred when an item was pulled from the cloud and then the Sync was turned off… but that is purely supposition.

7

I would add that the cloud approach is fine if you have halfway decent internet. I don’t and the app can be quite sluggish at slow internet speeds. 15Mb/1Mb is all I have access to… I suspect the upload speed is what is causing my issues.

8

No, it’s very unlikely that it’s related. If you experience performance issues, please contact our support team.

9

I like this idea, but I might suggest modeling it after software developers instead of traditional CAD modeling PDM systems. For instance, you maintain a local set of changes that you COMMIT to you GIT repository when you complete a set of changes that you want to deliver to a team (or simply create a revision state). In this way, you could use the power of these tools to leverage critical remote team collaboration, revision control, documentation of changes, and release updates to the team.

Additionally, it would be cool if the Designs section of the Home Screen connected with your GIT repository for all of the designs, so you wouldn’t just be exporting and importing, you would just open them up and it would in the background check out from the HEAD of the branch you are working on.

I think this could be a smart way to go so Shapr doesn’t have to recreate a wheel that already exists. There are also self-hosted GIT systems for companies that want to control their IP closely on in-house systems.

1 Like
10

Save/SaveAs is a paradigm that is standard to MacOS and is slowly moving to iPadOS. Implementing Save/SaveAs is very easy (as a software engineer who has been writing Mac software for decades, I can attest to that.)

It’s far simpler than implementing GIT.

But, if Shapr3D wants to add GIT capabilities to Shapr3D, that would also be appreciated. They DO need to be aware that TODAY I can also store whatever additional files are in the directory (Readme’s, texture files, notes, etc).

Storing JUST the Shapr3D file in the repo might work for a simple use case, but it would be too simplistic for my real world needs.

11

It would also be a good thing if it was possible to select the root folder for the local storage of files. “C:\Users[username]\AppData\Local” isn’t always ideal.