Find & Select - Control which criteria to populate using pick up / copy

[thesleepofreason]

As noted elsewhere, Find & Select is very potent but could be made much more efficient. There is however something strange with how pick up / copy settings currently work which I think need to be addressed regardless of my previous wish for higher efficiency.

We should be able to control which criteria are populated when using pick up / copy settings. It would make it possible to use saved criteria sets in a better way. Currently saved sets can't really be used as a template other than a fully defined shortcut or a stump to which criteria are added. 

For example, it is not possible to set up a search template for all elements that uses a specific complex profile name and then use pick up / copy to get the specific complex from a element in the model.

When trying to do this it will fundamentally change the criteria set (changing from the saved to 'custom') by populating the element type criteria and changing the operator of the complex profile name to 'contains' and populating it.

That using pick up / copy changes criteria to fit the selected element rather than just populating the values is strange. Just look at the consequence of element type always being populated. It should not affect the criteria set or operators at all and it would be more clear if it in the definition was possible to control which criteria that are populated when using pick up / copy.

If so, setting the complex profile name criteria as populatable would mean that its value is the only one changing when using pick up / copy and the saved criteria could efficiently be used as a search template. 

[DGSketcher]

Darwin's tree of life comes to mind with Find & Select... the criteria options should logically evolve based on previous selection but the downside is the workflow would compromise any simple short form criteria e.g. find red beams with property value "X".

Perhaps there is a potential template pick up mode where the pick up fully populates the criteria list with the basic values and the user deletes the unwanted criteria. I do have a feeling that it may take longer to delete the unwanted values than add.

I have possibly gone a bit off piste there. Certainly the point that saved CRITERIA should not be changed by object selection is valid. If the type is set to a single element e.g. Wall, then trying to pickup values from beams should be ignored and only the search values should change when picking up values from another wall. 

I get the intent of the post, unfortunately it currently feels a bit like "herding cats" trying to control F&S criteria.