Deactivating Elements

You can inactivate a geometric element: it acts as a temporary deletion. The element can have children or aggregated elements or not.

This may be useful when, in a complex part, a branch of the part should not be affected by an update, or is not updating correctly for instance. This capability will let you work on the other elements present in the document while ignoring a specific element.

Before you begin:

Create a 3D shape containing geometric elements that have children or aggregated elements.

Related Topics
More about the Deactivate Command

  1. Right-click the element to be deactivated from the specification tree, and select xxx object > Deactivate.

  2. Click OK.

    The selected element as well as its children and aggregated elements (if any and depending on the selected options) are deactivated. The ( ) symbol is displayed in the specification tree, and the corresponding geometry is hidden. For more information, refer to Part Design User's Guide: Interface Description: Masks.


  • If the selected element does not have any children nor any aggregated elements (for instance Line.2), it is directly deactivated. This is indicated by the ( ) symbol in the specification tree:




  • For all the other cases, the Deactivate dialog box appears and the geometry to be deactivated is highlighted.
    • The selected element has children but no aggregated elements.




      • The Deactivate all children option is selected: it lets you deactivate the geometry based upon the element to be deactivated, that is dependent elements. By default, the option is selected, except for modification features when a reroute is possible (see example below). If you clear the option, a warning icon is displayed to inform you that there will be an update error.

      • The Deactivate aggregated elements option is disabled.

    • The selected element has aggregated elements but no children (for instance a Part Design feature based on a sketch).




      • The Deactivate all children option is disabled.
      • The Deactivate aggregated elements option is enabled: it lets you deactivate the geometry aggregated below the element to be deactivated. Whenever you deactivate a feature, you can choose between deactivating the corresponding aggregated element or not (as shown below):

        When deactivating a Boolean operation, by default all operated bodies (located below the Boolean operation node) are deactivated too: just clear the Deactivate aggregated elements check box if you want to keep the bodies.

    • The selected element has children and aggregated elements.






      • Both Deactivate all children and Deactivate aggregated elements options are selected. If you clear the Deactivate all children check box, a warning icon is displayed to inform you that there will be an update error. If you clear the Deactivate aggregated elements check box, only the selected element will be deactivated.






      • The selected element is a modification feature, has children and a reroute is possible.



        You can select the Deactivate all children option to avoid rerouting the element. All children are deactivated.



        When no reroute is possible, the Deactivate all children option is selected.
      Important: In case of multi-selection, the number of elements is displayed in the Selection field. You can click to display the list of elements.

Important:
  • When elements are imported using multi-part links (external references) or using a Copy-Paste As result with link, the deactivation concerns the link, not the feature. As a consequence, the feature can still be selected. Moreover, the Deactivate command is not available through the contextual menu. Use the Edit > Links and Relations menu bar item instead. For more information, refer to Infrastructure User's Guide : Editing Links and Relations.
  • To re-activate the elements, right-click their name in the specification tree and choose xxx.object > Activate.
  • It is not possible to deactivate datum elements as they do not have an history. Indeed, a deactivation would destroy their geometry and a reactivation would therefore be impossible.
  • When the activation of a geometric feature is already piloted by a knowledge formula, it is not possible to activate or deactivate it using the contextual command.
  • For internal import, the feature pasted with the As Result with Link option appears in the geometry area even after deactivating in the specification tree. The deactivation also acts on the sub-features, which appear with the same mask as that of the deactivated features in the specification tree. Deactivation on internal copies causes freezing which means that, it will not be synchronized when update is performed.