Thanks Scott, although there is some interesting history to this.
I think the developers wanted to support it in V8 XM and onwards, but maybe just haven't quite got around to implementing it:
- All the chart options for Profile line styles etc.are actually being saved by WaterCAD, they are in the WTG file saved under the <ProfileAttributeElement> XML branches like this: Steema.TeeChart.ChartD���.Zoom.Allow.Panning.Allow.CustomChartRect.Panel.Brush.Color.Legend.Alignment...
- There appears to have been an intent to make the Profile Chart Options persistent (or why would they have bothered storing the Profile Chart options in the WTG file?):
- Some of the chart options for Profile are actually persistent (although the large majority are not). For instance if you Turn On and resize the Chart Panel Shadow through the Chart Options.........this does get written out to the WTG XML, and is retained as a Profile setting.
The current graphing technology in V8i started waaaaay back in V6.0 when GeoGrapher was incorporated into WaterCAD. Before that, you used Haestad Methods own graphing tools (and that was still the case in V6.0, you could either make a HM Graph, OR a GeoGrapher Graph). The graphing technology itself, however is/was from a 3rd party vendor (I believe it is/was provided by Steema Software?)
The really interesting thing was, previously in V6.0, all chart options changed by the user got saved! The actual Steema graph definition binary object was saved into the MDB file in the HMIGraph table under then then WaterCAD data schema. Any and all chart options were stored in this one binary object.
V8 XM took perhaps a retrograde step, a design decision for V7.0 -> V8 XM was made to move these user interface settings out of the MDB, and into the XML format WTG file. This I think is where the trouble started..........because the chart settings now had to be stored in a Bentley XML text format, not in a Steema TeeChart binary object.
So the interesting situation was, whereas in V7.0 and previous versions all WaterCAD chart options got saved and were persistent. However for V8 XM, that capability got lost and users were now losing the chart option settings. If I had to guess, it may have been because Bentley had to write an "interpreter" that read/writes back and forth from the Steema TeeChart chart settings API to the Bentley XML file.
As there are probably 100s of chart options, writing the "interpreter" interface to read/write from the WTG XML is not so much as being a hard thing to do, but probably laborious in having to map all of the Steema API chart options to corresponding chart option settings in the XML file.
As we use Profiles a lot (Graphs lots more), we are definitely keen to see this XML chart options read/write component finished off. ;-)