Chart Cart

The Chart Cart is a collection tray for charts. Build a chart on the main canvas – a Quick Chart, a My Chart, or a custom PID selection – add it to the cart, then keep going. When you're done, export every chart in the cart to a single multi-page PDF in one click, complete with chain-of-custody metadata.

The cart lives in a dockable panel on the right side of the main window (tabbed with the Log Console by default). Each chart you add appears as a small card with a live thumbnail, a title, and controls to reorder or remove it.

Typical use: capture several charts while working through the seven-step diagnostic process, then hand a customer or service writer one PDF that documents everything you looked at.

Adding a Chart to the Cart

Build any chart on the main canvas – a Quick Chart, a My Chart, or a custom PID selection – then add it using any of these:

Each add drops a full copy of the current chart – its PIDs, axis ranges, and chart type – into the cart. Later changes on the canvas don't affect charts already in the cart; each card is an independent snapshot.

The Chart Cart Panel

Across the top of the panel:

Below that, each chart is shown as its own card:

• Thumbnail – a small live preview of the chart, redrawn from its saved PIDs and axis settings.
• Title – the chart's title, wrapping to up to two lines.
• ▲ / ▼ (Move Up / Move Down) – reorder the chart within the cart. Order in the panel is the order charts appear in the exported PDF.
• ✕ (Remove) – removes just that one chart from the cart.

The panel automatically re-flows cards into more or fewer columns as you resize or float it, and scrolls vertically once you have more charts than fit on screen.

Editing a Chart Already in the Cart

Double-click any card to load that chart back onto the main canvas for editing – its PIDs are restored to the PID panel and its axis ranges to the toolbar controls, exactly as they were when it was added.

While you're editing a cart chart this way, the cart button on the chart toolbar switches from Add to Cart to Save changes to this cart chart (its tooltip updates to match). Clicking it now overwrites that same card in place instead of adding a new one.

Exporting to PDF

Click Export PDF and choose a save location. Snapshot Decoder renders one page per cart chart, in the order shown in the panel, at 11×8.5" landscape. Every page includes:

• The chart itself, redrawn at full print resolution (not just the small thumbnail)
• Chain-of-custody metadata – file name, date/time, and engine hours, when available
• A Snapshot Decoder version watermark

This is the same metadata footer used by the single-chart Save as PDF export on the chart toolbar – see Chart Controls – but combined into one file covering every chart you collected.

Managing the Panel Itself

The Chart Cart is tabbed with the Log Console dock by default – drag either tab to rearrange them, or drag the whole panel to a different edge of the window.

Cart Contents Are Not Recoverable

The cart only exists in memory for the current session – it isn't written to disk. It's cleared whenever:

• You open a different snapshot file while one is already loaded
• You use File → Close Snapshot
• You close Snapshot Decoder

Because of this, Snapshot Decoder always asks for confirmation before opening a new file or closing the current one whenever a snapshot is loaded, warning that current charts and the chart cart "cannot be saved." Export to PDF first if you want to keep what's in the cart.