Unintuitive behavior of the action “Assign Netclass” in KiCad8

[Jan Wichmann]

Hello KiCad user,

I noticed an unintuitive behavior of the action “Assign Netclass” in pcbnew and would like to discuss whether we can make this behavior more intuitive.
The “assign netclass” function only allows labeled tracks to be handled individually.
It would be more intuitive if I could select all tracks including footprints and then use 'assign netclass'. And the function to assigned all tracks from selected netclass.



The directive label is not such a good option.
This is my schematic, all signals to the right of (U505 and U506) I would have to label, which doesn't make the schematic very readable.



And without the directive labels, I still have to assign the unlabeled tracks to a netclass manually (Board setup > Net Classes).
In Kicad 9 it's a bit better, as I can use the 'Draw rule area' here.

Best regards,
Jan

[James Jackson]

Jan,

In the nightlies you can use a schematic rule area with an attached directive label to assign a netclass to any net contained within the rule area - that's less clutter than the many directive labels method you're showing. They are describe with an example at the end of the netclasses section in the nightly docs:

https://docs.kicad.org/master/en/eeschema/eeschema.html#schematic-netclasses

On the assign netclass functionality - it shouldn't be too tricky to extend this to apply to all selected tracks; I'll take a look.

James.

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[Jan Wichmann]

Hi James,

thank you for taking another look at the feature.
I am talking about KiCad 8, which does not yet have the schematic rule area.
Personally, I would leave it up to the user to decide which way to go,
whether schematic rule area with an attached directive label or via the
'Assign netclass' function.

BR,
Jan


Am 13.11.24 um 23:43 schrieb 'James Jackson' via KiCad Developers:

[James Jackson]

Jan,

Changing how the assign netclass feature works in that manner would be outside of the scope for 8.0 development in my view.

I’ve had a look at it for v9, and to make it work for multiple nets is quite a change (primarily the UI would need some thought). As we’re now in feature freeze, I’m not sure it would be appropriate to attack this now. I’d suggest this is one for v10; please lodge a feature request on GitHub if you wish

Yours,
James

> On 19 Nov 2024, at 04:05, 'Jan Wichmann' via KiCad Developers <dev...@kicad.org> wrote:
>
> Hi James,

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