cadquery

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Often it's easiest to create a workplane with one of the named orientations (like 'XY') and an offset in world coords. The Workplane.workplane method can't directly do this. I find myself continually abusing the Workplane.copyWorkplane method to create workplanes like so:

part = part.copyWorkplane(cq.Workplane("YZ", origin=(dim_x, dim_y, dim_z)))

and I see I'm not the only one who's picked up this habit: https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery/issues/357#issuecomment-670413077

Would you be interested in a PR that refactored the workplane generating code from Workplane.__init__ into a new method on the Workplane class like:

def namedWorkplane(inplane='XY', origin=(0, 0, 0)):

Workplane.__init__ would keep the same arguments and just pass them on to self.namedWorkplane to set up the first plane.

Now my example above would become:

part = part.namedWorkplane('YZ', origin=(dim_x, dim_y, dim_z))

Just as a side note, IMHO the Workplane.workplane method is focussed around making workplanes relative to a face. I like it how it is and I don't think it should be overloaded/overcomplicated to do this job as well.

I'm happy to do this PR, just thought I should get some opinions before I go refactor the code, write tests and docs.

I realised there is another option. Workplane.copyWorkplane could be changed to accept either an occ_impl.Plane or Workplane object. Then the above example would become

part = part.copyWorkplane(cq.Plane.named('XY', (dim_x, dim_y, dim_z)))

~~Not too sure which version I like better~~, I would love to hear some opinions!

Just realised this version is actually more keystrokes than my example of the problem. It just doesn't initialise a whole Workplane object so it doesn't feel as silly. I prefer adding namedWorkplane now.

I guess I'd lean towards the namedWorkplane solution, but I rarely feel the need to use copyWorkplane, so I may be a skewed sample. I'd be interested in what @adam-urbanczyk thinks about this.

Actually I'd vote for extending workplane to support this use case (.workplane('XY') ) and the one described in #357 (.workplane((1,1,1)). I find this kind of API much cleaner. And there is still #379 waiting to be investigated.

I'm agreeing with @adam-urbanczyk now, this is a great candidate for multimethods (#379).

It sounds like it's safe to start the PR then @marcus7070

What ever happened to this PR? Is this still being worked on? I think the .workplane('XY') syntax proposed by adam above would be a fantastic addition for usability!

@jpoles1 I don't think a PR ever got created for this issue. @marcus7070 is busy with other things, so there's no ETA unless someone else wants to take the task over.