Fix Parameters

Description

Fix Parameters allows you to define a fixed set of choices for specific variables. Future plots can use this set of fixed variables, so you don’t have to define the same set of design choices repeatedly.

Application

Fix Parameters can be particularly helpful when generating several plots in a row, since you can define your variable values once and then use those fixed values in all future steps.

Fix Parameters can also be useful for generating plots in dashboards: the sliders for choosing variables appear separate from any plots; and the sliders can be used to fix variables in multiple plots at once. This allows you to fine-tune the dashboard user interface. It also makes it much faster to explore the behaviour of new fixed design choices.

How to use

When you first click on Fix Parameters, you will need to choose which Model(s) you want to fix variables for. You can only fix variables which are inputs to at least one of these models.

After choosing a model, you can select which variables should have fixed values. The simplest way to do this is to click on the dropdown list with title Group 1: Columns, and then select the variables for which you want fixed values. Pressing Apply will generate a Fixed Parameters object that can be passed to future steps.

After pressing Apply, you should see a set of sliders and/or dropdown lists. You should see one slider/dropdown for each of the variables that you selected to be fixed. By changing the values of these sliders/dropdowns, you will update the fixed values in the Fix Parameters object and cause future steps to update their plots accordingly.

If you are fixing the values of several parameters, you can also group these parameters into different sections. Try adding a new Fix Parameters step and pressing the New Group button. Each group has a name (which appears in the title of the section) and a set of variables to be fixed. See the examples below for more details on this.

Examples

Example 1: Fixing the value of a single parameter

With these choices, you should see something like this after pressing Apply:

Example 2: Fixing multiple parameters in groups

With these choices, you should see something like this after pressing Apply:

Example 3: Using in a dashboard

This can be particularly useful when building dashboards, since the sliders appear separately from the plot and can be used to update multiple plots at once. In this dashboard, the sliders in the top left panel define the fixed Design Choices and Operating Conditions for all three of the other plots. 

Notice that the parameter TopViewCurvature was not selected as part of the fixed parameters, and was therefore added as a slider for the two plots on the right. If TopViewCurvature was added in Fix Parameters, then the sliders would disappear in the scalar predictions, and the curve prediction would highlight the value of TopViewCurvature with a blue point on the curve.