Saturday 14 March 2015

Making of Feature Toggler Part 01

A feature toggler changes the state of features from suppressed to un-suppressed and vice-versa. If 3 of 5 rounds are suppressed, it un-suppresses the 3 round features but suppresses the other 2.

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Thus it acts on all features of the selected type from a list.This utility perhaps has the tiniest dialog interface in the world.

When you click on Holes from the list, it goes to each hole in the model and checks if it is suppressed and un-suppresses it. Similarly, if any hole is un-suppressed, it is suppressed.

The feature toggler has many applications:

1. Remove i.e. suppress any treatment or dress-up features before sending out the model for analysis where these smaller features like holes and chamfers do not play an important role.

2. Center-of-gravity analysis where you want to quickly toggle the state of some type of features as you add and remove more features.

3. Archiving Part documents where suppressing all rounds, chamfers, holes, ribs and drafts is shown to have up to 40% reduction in file size.

First observe how this program is going to work from the video below:

www.SurfAndCode.in [Feature Toggler Demo]

This Solid Edge Maker Faire tutorial takes you through the complete process of coding this program. Other making tutorials in this series can be accessed here.

01_thumb2_thumb_thumb_thumb This Solid Edge Feature Toggler program and its source code can be downloaded at the end of this tutorial.

This tutorial uses Visual Studio 2010, .Net 4.0.

Start a VB.Net 'Forms Application' and name it FeatureToggler. Make sure the check box settings are as shown below (3):

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From the menu, select Project >  Add Reference... and from the dialog that appears, take the COM tab. Add references to Solid Edge Framework, Solid Edge Framework Support, Solid Edge Constants and Solid Edge Part libraries.

You can see these added under References in the Solution Explorer:

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Create a Form as shown below. It consists of a single ListBox.

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Continued to Part 2...


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