Advanced Selection

As opposed to the selection of objects by picking in the current drawing, this mode of selecting objects is suitable for making selections that are more complex. Objects can be selected by name (or any part of it) or type, and the selection can be limited to a specified part of the ship. All these selection criteria may be combined, picking only objects matching all the criteria. With a number of matching objects, the selection may be narrowed, either by specifying further criteria or by excluding objects matching some other criteria.

As an example, the selection may be done in the following steps:

1. Select all objects between frames 40 and 60, with no limits in other directions.

2. Narrow the selection by specifying that the selected objects must be shell profiles.

3. Exclude all selected objects with a name starting with "EST23".

The sequence above may end up with the transversals EST10, EST20 and EST30. If the transversals EST23 and EST231 exist in the specified area, they are still selected after the first two steps, but the last step will remove them from the selection.

Please note that in principle, the advanced selection mode only handles object types supported by Interactive Curved Hull Modelling and the curved parts of Structural Design, with the exception of plane panels which also can be selected. Shell profile features, although not being actual objects, can also be selected. Geometry objects, such as points and general cylinders, cease to exist when they are not selected, so there is no need for support of selecting such objects.

The form used for advanced selections is described below.

Figure 2:51. Form for advanced object selections.

The Name field: Name of objects to select. The name may include wild cards, that means, "*" for any number of characters and "?" or "%" for exactly one character. If this field is empty, no restrictions will be placed on the object name.

The Type field: Type of objects to select. Setting this field to All will match any type of objects.

The Surface field: This field may be used to limit the selection to objects located in a particular surface. Default will limit the selection to the current default surface. Setting this field to All will find objects in any surface.

Xmin, Xmax, Ymin, Ymax, Zmin and Zmax: These fields are used to limit the selection with a box. Any objects at least partially inside the box will be considered as matching. If any of the box fields are left empty, the box will be considered as unlimited in the corresponding directions.

The selection mode can be controlled by the Action list field. When no objects are selected, this will be set to Add, which will make matching objects being added to the selection. With more objects selected, the field value may in addition be set to Remove or Restrict, to exclude objects or narrow the selection with further criteria, respectively.

If Select All Objects is checked, all shell profiles, curved panels, shell plates, seams, hull curves and storable planes are selected. This function is most useful if the surface shape has changed since the objects were created, and the objects in the shell must be recreated by use of the Recreate function. Since shell stiffeners are automatically recreated before the corresponding shell profiles, there is no need to include stiffeners in the selection in such a situation. The same is true for shell profile features.

The difference compared to a selection via Type/All is that the box is disregarded and that only certain object types are selected.

The number to the right of the text Selected Objects will show the number of matching objects. This number includes any objects already selected before the advanced selection function was started.

The Ok button: Pushing this button will close the form and actually update the current selection according to the given selection criteria.

The Apply button: This button updates the object count in the form without closing the form, letting you further refine the selection.

The Pick button: Toggle to picking objects in the drawing. The objects picked will be filtered with the contents of the Type and box fields described above. This means that objects picked will only be added to the selection if they match the criteria in these fields.

Note: that any string typed in the Name field will be ignored in this case. Use Options to return to the advanced selection mode.

The List button displays a list of all objects matching the selection criteria. Objects that were already selected when the Select function was invoked are not listed.

The Cancel button will quit the selection without actually selecting any new objects.

The Undo button will take back the last change of the selection criteria, that means, return to the state before the Apply button was last pressed.