Import DataDoctor > Design Intent Modification Tools > Cut, Copy, Paste, and Delete > About the Paste Operation in IDD
  
About the Paste Operation in IDD
A Paste operation places or copies the contents of the clipboard at the designated position on the GTS tree. If the clipboard was populated by the Cut operation, the first Paste operation after a cut operation places the cut items in a new location preserving the IDs of the cut node or nodes and their associated geometry. For any additional paste operation for entities that were cut, or if the clipboard is populated by the copied entities, the paste operation results in new geometry with new and unique IDs.
You can select the following nodes types as targets for the Paste operation when clipboard contains a node with surfaces:
A base-level Combine or active Combine node
A base-level Component or active Component node
A subnode of the Combine node
The root node, that is, the import feature node
 
* If the clipboard contains only datum entities, you may paste them into any complex node, including merge nodes, at any level on the GTS tree.
If you paste the contents of the clipboard at the root or base level or the active Combine node, the structure of the pasted node is preserved when it is placed at the target location.
If you paste the contents of the clipboard at a base level or active Component node, IDD adds all the geometry of the node on the clipboard to the Component node. If the pasted node is a complex node such as merge, combine, another component, or a procedural node, its structure is collapsed into its constituent surface and datum leaf nodes, which are placed directly under the target component.
When pasting the surface geometry of any structure into a component or a combine node, new two-sided edges are created between the pasted geometry and the existing geometry of the target node by stitching together matching one-sided edge pairs.
You can perform a paste operation even if you did not select a target node to empty the selection buffer. The result is the same as explicitly selecting the base node or the import feature as the target.
 
If you copy or cut datums as a collection of individual nodes and you paste them in the base-level node, they are placed in the Datums Bin. Individual datum entities are never listed as individual base-level nodes.
When you cut or copy surface subsets and paste them into the base-level node or the combine node, the result is a component node containing all the leaf surfaces.
When you cut and paste active surfaces into a component or in the GTS tree, the pasted surfaces are deactivated but remain selected after they are pasted to facilitate easy activation. Right-click the selected surface and click Activate to activate the surfaces that show selection, as required. For a copy and paste operation with multiple instances of paste, the surfaces of the last pasted instance remain selected while the original set of surfaces remains active.