Introduction to selections

Whenever the user needs to do anything with any part of his/her model, he/she must, first of all, determine which part of the model should be treated. In other words, the user has to make a "selection" of members that will be processed.

Once the selection is defined, the required operation may be started. The selection may be formed by a single entity or it may hold as many entities as required. Generally, the selection may contain entities of the same type, or it may contain several entity types. Which of the two cases is applied depends on the intended operation. Some operations require specific entity types, other operations may be carried out with any entity types.

In general, there are two approaches to start an operation:

• the user first makes the selection and then starts the appropriate function (the function then deals with the prior made selection),

• the user first starts the required function and then (i.e. from within the function) makes the selection.

Which approach is actually applied depends only on work habits of a particular user.

To sum up, the selection can be not only made and utilised in a function, but it can be also modified (reduced or extended), cleared, saved into a file for later use or loaded from a previously created file.

Selections are controlled via Main menu > Tools > Selections.