Supported features — gull system handbook

The browser rebuilds your model from a recipe, feature by feature. What to check on a model before you build a whole page on it, and what each supported feature does not cover.

Supported features — what the browser can rebuild

A web configurator does not replay your model like a video. It rebuilds it in the buyer's browser from a recipe — walking the feature tree and recomputing every feature. Before you build a whole page on a model, look at what it is made of.

This is not about performance or the size of the part. It is about whether the browser can recompute every feature in the tree at the values your buyer enters. What it cannot, it exports as suppressed — the part is then built without it, and nothing flashes.

SOLIDWORKS

The only CAD supported so far. The features below are verified against SOLIDWORKS on real models: every body's volume was compared with the one SOLIDWORKS computed, after each change of a dimension.

Drivable — a rule changes them

These features own a dimension you can wire to a buyer's input. The value changes, the shape rebuilds.

• Extrude — boss, cut, thin. Blind, through all, through next, up to a surface and starting from one. Thin walls and flip side to cut work too. The most used feature and the best verified — on a real part the volume lands within 0.08 %. ⚠ Not covered: draft, the end conditions that stop at a body, a vertex, the next face or a selection, and a cut driven by anything other than a sketch curve. A feature using one is left out and the page says so. Unverified: a thin wall extruded both ways with a different thickness each side — we have not measured such a part against SOLIDWORKS yet.
• Revolve. Boss and cut, full turn or a segment. ⚠ Not covered: mid-plane and two-direction revolves — those keep the angle they were exported with.
• Pattern — linear and circular. The instance count is drivable: your buyer can change it and copies appear and disappear. ⚠ Not covered: an axis SOLIDWORKS binds to an edge rather than to a sketch line — that pattern stays where it was exported.
• Fillet and chamfer. A fillet along an extrude and across it. ⚠ Not covered: variable radius, and a fillet that overflows onto a neighbouring face.

Not drivable — they follow what made them

These rebuild correctly but have nothing of their own to drive. They own no dimension — they move when the thing they copy or cut moves. That is not a limitation, it is the answer to "what do I put in the form": not these. It does not mean you cannot configure them — they change with the sketches underneath.

• Sweep. It is driven through its sketches rather than through itself: the shape comes from the profile and the path, and both are sketches a rule can drive. Only where the path is a sketch of the same part — 2D or 3D. ⚠ Not covered: a path that is a helix, a composite curve or a chain of edges. Such a sweep is suppressed whole.
• Mirror — of bodies and of features. Copies follow their seed and take its appearance with them.
• Intersect. Including where one feature produces several bodies.
• Weldments — members, trim, end caps. The profile rides the path, the roll is derived, a trim cuts the right side. ⚠ Not covered: a member whose end is coped so that several planes end up square to the profile — its faces cannot then be named unambiguously.

Sketches

• Lines, arcs and circles — the foundation, verified over thousands of segments.
• Ellipses — whole and partial. Dimensioning across one, end of axis to end of axis, works.
• Splines — closed and open, as long as they carry no handles (tangency or curvature). The curve is recomputed the way SOLIDWORKS computes it.
• Relations — of the 32 types found in real models, the browser solves 31.

⚠ What does not reliably work in a sketch: relations that reach outside it. When a point is attached to a model edge or to another sketch, the browser holds it where it was at export. The sketch is then fully defined and frozen — its dimension still changes, but the geometry does not follow. Across real models this is by far the most common limit.

Assemblies

Mates between parts are solved, so an assembly reassembles after a dimension changes — coincident, concentric, parallel, distance, angle and point-on-plane. Mirrored and patterned copies follow their seed.

⚠ Supported means "it recomputes", not "it looks the same". Colour, texture and material come from the export rather than from the rebuild — and whatever cannot be rebuilt from a feature is not drawn, with a reason given. An empty space beats a shape nobody designed.