Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

Suspend groups in "stages"

Stuart Atkinson
Participant
I would like the ability to use the suspend group command in “stages”.

Ie
Draw some stumps (columns) – group.
Draw some bearers (beams) – group
Draw some joist (more beams) – group.
Now group all three groups together.

At the moment the suspend group command suspends all groups.
I would like a “suspend main group” command which would allow me to suspend the whole group but still allow me to select my previously grouped items as a group.
There would then be another option to suspend those items still grouped.

ArchiCAD has the capability to do this, as it remembers each group, and when you un-group things it breaks things down into whatever groups were existing.

Edit: Thought of a better way of describing it. Suspend groups in levels. Options then being suspend first level. Suspend second level etc.... until all levels of groups have been suspended. (Still with a suspend all groups command of course).
Cheers
Stuart
17 REPLIES 17
Anonymous
Not applicable
Keith wrote:
....Maybe modules would be the answer (if we had 'in place' editing!)
I think if modules and groups were combined to some extent, with in-place editing, it could become very powerful. You could have the choice to set them up as either 'component' objects / assemblies, or one-off groups on-the-fly.
Stuart Atkinson
Participant
kliment wrote:
You can do exactly what you want now! When you make new groups you must have groups enabled. Thus AC keeps group hierarchy. When you ungroup with groups enabled you have this hierarchy working backwards.

..........................

I think groups work very well now! Complaints usually come from people, who don't know all the tricks with working with groups.
You miss the point.
I all ready know how to use groups. I all ready know they keep their hierarchy when ungrouping with groups enabled.
BUT, at the moment when you suspend groups it suspends ALL groups.
What i "wished" for is the suspend groups to work in the reverse order the hierarchy is made.

Which i know will be handy to all that use groups.
Erika Epstein
Booster
Stuart wrote:
You miss the point.
We don't miss the point. We happen to disagree with you and the importance of your wish.
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System

"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"
Erika Epstein
Booster
Peter wrote:
Keith wrote:
....Maybe modules would be the answer (if we had 'in place' editing!)
I think if modules and groups were combined to some extent, with in-place editing, it could become very powerful. You could have the choice to set them up as either 'component' objects / assemblies, or one-off groups on-the-fly.
Peter,
I like your idea of being able to more easily modify modules; perhaps you could expand on this in a separate wish.
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System

"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"
Barry Kelly
Moderator
Erika wrote:
Stuart wrote:
You miss the point.
We don't miss the point. We happen to disagree with you and the importance of your wish.
Kliment did and looking at your earlier post I think you don't quite realise what Stuart wants either.

Ungrouping a master group is fine as it leaves all the subgroups which can be moved or manipulated as needed (so long as gouping is enabled).
But what Stuart wants is the ability to turn the master group back on.
Currently this can't be done whereas you and Kliment both seem to think it can - you have to select all of the subgroups and re-group them manually.

That's not hard to do unless there are a lot of them and they are scattered all around the plan or there were some individual objects included in the master group.

I'll be voting "Important" as I don't think it is essential, but I can definitely see what Stuart is after and that it is important to him.

Barry.
One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
Dell XPS- i7-6700 @ 3.4Ghz, 16GB ram, GeForce GTX 960 (2GB), Windows 10
Lenovo Thinkpad - i7-1270P 2.20 GHz, 32GB RAM, Nvidia T550, Windows 11
Erika Epstein
Booster
I do understand. For all that I am a devotee of the grouping feature, I haven't found a need for this. When I want to do what you describe, I can suspend groups, select the elements of the one or more groups that I want to remove or delete and ungroup. When grouping is enabled, the nested grouping remains intact.

It may just be that I don't have to do this that much. Murphy's law, that will be how I will spend the next 3 days.

I also use a lot of modules and it is easy to do this kind of editing there as although I agree with Peter that this aspect of modules could use improvement.

I am not against the wish, just the way I have used the program, it's not a priority. I'm not ruling out that should it be implemented. who knows, I might find it indispensable.
Erika
Architect, Consultant
MacBook Pro Retina, 15-inch Yosemite 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Mac OSX 10.11.1
AC5-18
Onuma System

"Implementing Successful Building Information Modeling"
Stuart Atkinson
Participant
Erika wrote:
I do understand. For all that I am a devotee of the grouping feature, I haven't found a need for this. When I want to do what you describe, I can suspend groups, select the elements of the one or more groups that I want to remove or delete and ungroup. When grouping is enabled, the nested grouping remains intact.
.
To pick you up on this point, what if you have to individually pick 20 items that you have previously grouped, but now can't as they are part of a master group (and you have suspended the groups), and you dont want to ungroup that master group as you'll end up with 100 other individual items that you will have to select, one at a time, to re-group them back into the master group?.
This example is a perhaps little extreme, but you get my point.

I based the wish on the fact that ArchiCAD already remembers the hierarchy of the groups and it would certainly make my drafting life easier if i could better utilise this.
I figured others may also like the idea. If you don't that is fine and you can cast your vote accordingly.

And to those that mentioned modules, i think that is a separate subject.
Barry Kelly
Moderator
Erika wrote:
I do understand. For all that I am a devotee of the grouping feature, I haven't found a need for this. When I want to do what you describe, I can suspend groups, select the elements of the one or more groups that I want to remove or delete and ungroup. When grouping is enabled, the nested grouping remains intact.
That's fine if you want to move or delete individual elements, but what if you want to do that to the whole of one of the sub-groups? - could be dozens of individual elements.
Suspending knocks everything back to individual elements and ungrouping destroys the group completely.
So at the moment Stuart can't win.

Of course you can always save a selection set (in Find & Select palette) so as well as selecting it to group you can save that selection so it can be re-selected later.
Erika wrote:
It may just be that I don't have to do this that much. Murphy's law, that will be how I will spend the next 3 days. .

Erika wrote:
I am not against the wish, just the way I have used the program, it's not a priority. I'm not ruling out that should it be implemented. who knows, I might find it indispensable.
I think it is one of these "It would be nice" wishes but is certainly not essential for me at least.
On the surface it seems to make sense that it would be easy to implement but who knows.
I rarely use groups (except those that are already auto-grouped) and even less rarely have sub-goups in groups.
But maybe if it worked I would use it more.

Barry.
One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
Dell XPS- i7-6700 @ 3.4Ghz, 16GB ram, GeForce GTX 960 (2GB), Windows 10
Lenovo Thinkpad - i7-1270P 2.20 GHz, 32GB RAM, Nvidia T550, Windows 11