Priority Selection to Body by default in NX8.5

There are five possible 'Top Selection Priority' settings: Features, Faces, Bodies, Edges and Components. Except for the possible exception of Components, it's very hard to predict when and where any one of these settings should be the default, even by the user himself. So we never even wasted our time giving you a setting that would pre-set the default so that, and I assume this is what you're asking for, that every time a new session of NX starts, that the 'Top Selection Priority' is set to 'Body' (or whatever you want it to be).

Normally we expect users to take advantage of QuickPick to select past the 'Top Priority' or to simply switch the desired 'Top Selection Priority' that they need to use when they feel that they need to use it. To that end, we made it very easy to switch, either by picking the desired setting from the Selection Bar, or by using a keyboard gesture (AKA 'Hot Key' or 'Shortcut') to quickly change the current setting, as in...

Shift+F for Feature

Shift+G for Face

Shift+B for Body

Shift+E for Edge

Shift+C for Component

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
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Hi John

One more time, I asked this question for one of my customer that need to change the priority selection to body for this kind of activity inside NX.

Of course I know Shift+F... and I changed it on my role by F, G, E, B, C like in a previous version



Regards
Didier Psaltopoulos

Unless they are doing something very unusual, I'm not sure what sort of work would require that you must always be selecting bodies instead of features (which is the hard-coded default). What version of NX is your customer running?

The reason I ask is because a few years ago we made a change which made the priority setting virtually inconsequential. If the operation that you're peforming is expecting to find a body even if you picked a feature, the software will simply walk down the hierarchy of the model until it finds the body.

To see what I mean, try this simple case: Open an complex solid model with lots of features. Now select one of the features and hit 'Hide'. Obviously you can't 'Hide' a feature, you can ONLY hide standalone objects like a body or a curve, but in the above example the Body gets 'Hidden' anyway. Years ago the Priority settings were honored absolutely so in this example you would have gotten an error and you would have had to start over. We finally decided that if we left the Default priority set to 'Feature' and we used this 'walk the tree' scheme, that users would always get the Feature that they wanted or the Body that they wanted or the Component that they wanted even if they picked a feature first. Only in the case of a Face or an Edge would you really need to either use QuickPick or change the Priority or set an explicit filter, and since most people learn to use QuickPick rather quickly (excuse the pun) the current situation has proven to be very usable as virtually NO ONE ever asks about this any more. Yours has got to be the first that I've heard of in years.

Besides, priority selection ONLY comes into play when using what we call 'Global Selection', that is where you select something FIRST and then select on operation to perform, sometimes call an 'Object -> Action' paradigm. If you had selected a menu item first, than the priority selection doesn't come into play at all as the function controls what get picked and what doesn't. For example in the 'Hide' example above, if I had opened the Hide dialog first and then picked something ONLY standalone objects would even be eligible for selection, PERIOD.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Hi John,

I agree with you, I remember this: "Years ago the Priority settings were honored absolutely so in this example you would have gotten an error and you would have had to start over"

My customer used NX7 and I'm doing a NX8.5 training until tomorrow

He often use unsew and would like to quickly blank the sheet body created, so he need the priority selection to body instead of feature

I forgot to show him hide immediately


Regards
Didier Psaltopoulos