Bend

Click on a Field, and a Clarity Panel is displayed (let’s just call this a Panel in this discussion). Here’s an annotated diagram of how it could look :

Clicking on a field selects it and displays a Panel for editing it. Here are some of the elements we see in this panel:

You can select additional entities by holding down the kbd:[Shift] key when you click on them. When multiple entities are selected, a Panel is displayed that allows you to edit the settings of all of them at the same time.

In the image above, we have 3 fields that we selected using the kbd:[Shift+Click] mechanism. The panel that is displayed allows us to edit the settings of all these three fields at the same time. (Here we have the Visual expander open and the Font expander closed). After editing the Bgrd color and the Pen-width settings, here’s how the report looks:

The changes we made are applied to all the selected items. In this multiple-edit scenario, note that the Expression setting is not displayed; this is one of the settings that we are unlikely to want to edit together for a set of fields (we would not really want 3 fields displaying the same value from the Part). Settings which would usually have distinct values for each entity are not displayed in such group-editing panels.

In the example above, we selected three entities of the same type. What happens if we select entities of different types? Let us see. First, here is how the panel for a Shape entity looks:

If we select a Field and a Shape at the same time, this is the panel that is displayed:

In addition to the common subset of settings and operations available on multiple objects, multiple-selection may sometimes present new operations or settings that are not available on individual objects. Let us take an example from the bending view to illustrate this. In the bend view, clicking on a bend displays a panel to edit the settings of the bend and perform some operations on it:

The image above shows the panel for bend 3. Let us now hold down kbd:[Shift] and select bend 4 as well. The panel that is now displayed looks like this:

There are some settings that we can edit in common (the skip bending setting or the station number setting). However we see a new button here called Group. Since two bends are selected, and these are collinear, they could be grouped into a single bend operation. This is detected automatically, and this new Group button is displayed; this operation is not available when just a single bend is selected. Clicking on that button groups the two bends together, as you can see in the image below.

Now, there are only 3 bend operations in this part. Also, bend 3 is now a grouped bend and you see a new button appear: Ungroup

A Clarity panel will often have a Selection sub-panel near the bottom. This panel provides some buttons to modify the selection in various ways. Usually, there are buttons to select more objects that are similar in some way or the other. For example, some ways to expand the selection would be:

Here is an example from the report editor of a selection panel being displayed when we click on a Field in a report:

The selection sub-panel has a distinctive patterned background and rounded buttons. In this example, you can see buttons to select all Fields, select all Bend fields (fields related to bend CAM data), and to toggle the current selection set.

The actual list of selection buttons displayed in this sub-panel will vary depending on the context. You will find that most common scenarios are handled very conveniently by these selection buttons.

The set of entities in a part, report or layout often have a hierarchical structure. We call this the Entity Tree. The structure is typically represented like an upside-down tree, with the 'parent' object at the top and children below it. Here’s an example of an entity tree in a report.

Thus, there are 3 levels in this tree, and a graphical representation of this tree could be as follows:

This report has 2 Labels, 1 Field and 1 Table. The Table has 4 columns. When we click on the table, we see a panel like this:

The navigation panel provides directional navigation buttons to walk through the entity tree. Like the selection panel, the navigation sub-panel has a distinctive textured background, and appears at the bottom of the panel, but just above the selection sub-panel.

The [arrow left] Prev. and Next [arrow right] buttons move among items at the same level of the entity tree. Thus, clicking these buttons would select the other items in the report, such as the Label or the Field items in the report.

Clicking the Report [arrow up] would move up from the table to the parent - the Report itself. The panel that is displayed when you click on the Report button shows some settings related to the report itself, such as the paper size and the margins:

Now we are editing the report; we are at the root of the entity tree. There is no direction to go but down, and thus the navigation sub-panel has just one button ([arrow down] Items) to go down to the list of items. Clicking this selects the table again.

From the table, the down navigation [arrow down] Columns button moves us down one level and puts us in column-editing mode. This is what happens when we click the [arrow down] Columns navigation button from the table panel:

The settings for the selected column in the table are displayed. Clicking the [arrow left] Prev. and Next [arrow right] buttons now moves the selection between the columns in the table, since that is the level in the tree we are working with. There is no down navigation button, since this is the lowest level in the tree. The Table [arrow up] button moves up one level, and we are back to editing the entire table.