Assign new parameters to material properties

[qwertymodo 0]

I have been reading up on the "stack" structure of Cura's print settings and how it layers things like base config, machine config, material config, quality config, and user overrides, and I think I at least have a basic understanding of how that all interacts.  However, I can't seem to find any way to change which "layer" of the "stack" a particular settings change goes into.  For example, I am using the Linear Advance Setting Plugin to add linear advance K-factor control to my gcode.  However, the only way to save this setting seems to be as a custom quality profile.  This doesn't really make sense, since the linear advance K-factor is tied to the material, regardless of quality settings.  This basically means that 1) I can no longer use the built-in quality settings and 2) I have to create a whole new settings profile for every single material, since they each have a unique K-factor.  Is there any way that the linear advance settings can be assigned to the material instead of the quality profile?  Ideally it would be really nice if it could be added into the "manage materials" GUI window, but if that's not possible, even manual config file editing would at least be something.  This is pretty annoying, because wanting to add this one extra parameter to my slicing, which greatly enhances the quality of my prints, basically means I have to bypass the entire intended workflow of the config stack and just create custom quality profiles for everything.

[qwertymodo 0]

Poking around in the config files, it looks like material properties are stored in materials\*.xml.fdm_material, and setting key names use spaces, whereas *.def.json files and *.inst.cfg files use underscores.  It also appears that the *.def.json and *.inst.cfg files prepend "material_" to the material properties, so if I want to move the key "material_linear_advance_factor" from its current place in my *.inst.cfg (quality settings) files, it should go into *.xml.fdm_material as <setting key="linear advance factor"> is that right?

[nallath 1,122]

The great @ahoeben created a plugin for exactly what you want: https://marketplace.ultimaker.com/app/cura/plugins/fieldofview/MaterialSettingsPlugin

 

If you like his work, don't forget to donate something to him. He's not getting paid for making these plugins, so if you can spare something, i'm sure he'd appreciate it.

Edited July 15, 2021 by nallath