Hi,
I got this from Mark Tucker after I found myself baffled by using dopfield() to extract spring length data, so I could make sounds in CHOps with it (important production work).
Thought I'd pass it along in case others have some issues with this stuff like me ) I immediately changed the colours of the Details view as described below and it makes a world of difference. IMHO different colours should be the defaults but at least you can change it yourself.

Cheers,

Peter B

- The field name and the record name never have any “/”s in them. If you
ever feel an urge to put a “/” in either of these values, don't. Put the
“/” in the data name instead.
- A record always appears as a leaf in the tree (it has no child nodes).
The name of the record is the name of that leaf.
- The names that appear in the right hand portion of the simulation tree
view are the field names. If you don't see it in the right hand pane
beside the tree, it's not a valid field name.
- Data in the tree always has child branches (sub-data and the records
of that data).
- Use dopoption and dopoptions liberally. These expressions are
identical to dopfield but assume that the record name is “Options” and
the record number is 0. This is what you want 95% of the time.

Also, in $HH/MiscColors, there are lines to define the colors for DOP
objects, data, and records (SIMObjectColor, SIMDataColor, and
SIMRecordColor). So you can actually color the different components
differently. Notice that there is no color for fields because fields
never appear in the tree itself, only in the panel to the right of the tree.

actually thats funny I'm trying to make sounds with DOPs too, not important production work but it could be once I have my systems worked out.

Anyway .. I'm currently trying to combine stamped/generated wires, with wire glue constraints, and also a force feild instead of collisions to make the wires not go through the wall, since the collisions on the inside of a cylinder were bringing it to a hault.

The feild works great until I apply it to my real system that's being automatically generated, something isn't working … and while everyone says how great the details view is I'm still pretty mystified by it .. is there a flow diagram anywhere to explain exactly how a dop is constructed and how the subdata interacts with the objects?

yes please, that would be great!