Suppression feature

The suppression feature temporarily suppresses a set of entities in your drawing. If the condition is equal to zero, all entities are displayed. Otherwise, entities are suppressed.

Suppressed entities are internally placed on a special frozen layer. This allows you to speed up orbit, zoom and pan operations, improves object selection performance and reduces regeneration time for complex drawings. Suppressed entities are also excluded from mass properties calculations (generated drawing views and bill of materials). Use a parametrically-driven expression for the condition parameter of a suppression feature, to create different design variants of your parametric components.

Creating a suppression feature

Execute the SUPPRESS command.

Managing suppression features

Select the suppression feature in the Mechanical Browser panel, then right-click to display a context menu.

The available options are:

  • Suppress: Suppresses the entity set.
    • The Suppressed icon () indicates the suppressed state.
    • The option now reads Unsuppress.
  • Unsuppress: Unsuppresses the entity set.
    • The Unsuppressed icon () indicates the unsuppressed state.
    • The option now reads Suppress.
  • Dissolve: Deletes the suppression feature.

  • Edit Selection: Allows you to add/remove entities from the selection.

    All members of the selection are highlighted.

    • Select entities to add.
    • Shift + Select (hold down the Shift key, then use a selection method on) entities to remove.
    • Right-click to stop editing.
  • Zoom to: Zooms onto selected entities.

    To compose a selection set:

    • Click a suppression feature to select all its members.
    • Expand a suppression feature, then click to select an entity.
    • Ctrl + Click to add/remove entities from the selection.
  • Select: Selects all members of a suppression feature.

Setting a condition for a suppression feature

You can set an expressional condition for a suppression feature. Depending on the value of the current expression, the entities will be suppressed or unsuppressed automatically.

In the Mechanical Browser panel:

  1. Select the suppression feature (use the "Search" field to search by name).
  2. Enter an expression in Condition field in the properties grid.

In the Parameters and Constraints panel:

  1. Select the parameter with the same name as the suppression feature (use the "Search" field to search by name).
  2. Enter an expression in the Expression column.