Read Access to Groups
Groups in Creo+ represent sets of contiguous features that act as a single feature for purposes of some operations. While the individual features can be affected by most operations individually, certain operations apply to the entire group:
• Suppress
• Delete
• Layer operations
• Patterning operations
For more information about local groups, see the Part Modeling User's Guide.
User-Defined Features (UDFs) are groups of features that can be stored in a file. When a UDF is placed in a new model, the features created are automatically assigned to a group.
A local group is a set of features that have been explicitly assigned to a group, for purposes of ease of modification or patterning.
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Note:
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All the functions in this section work for both UDFs and local groups.
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Each instance of a group is identified in Creo TOOLKIT as a ProGroup structure. This structure is the same a ProFeature data handle:
typedef struct pro_model_item {
ProMdl owner;
int id;
ProType type;
} ProGroup;
The integer id in this case is the id of the group header feature, which is the first feature in the group. All groups, including those in models created before release 200i2, are assigned with a group header feature upon retrieval.
The consequences of the group header feature for users of previous versions of Pro/TOOLKIT is as follows:
• Models that contain groups automatically get one extra feature in the regeneration list, of type PRO_FEAT_GROUP_HEAD. This changes the feature numbers of all subsequent features, including those in the group.
• Each group automatically contains one new feature in the arrays returned by Pro/TOOLKIT.
• Each group automatically gets a different leader feature (the group head feature is the leader). The leader is the first feature in the arrays returned by Pro/TOOLKIT.
• Each group pattern contains, of course, a series of groups, and each group in the pattern is similarly altered.