More about Displaying Parents and Children

There are a few things you need to know about how to display parents and children.

The following topics are discussed:

Parent/Children Applied to Dress-Up Features

The application builds a dress-up feature using edges or faces belonging to a feature of any kind previously created. The geometry of this feature is then considered as parent to the dress-up feature.

As design goes on, the application computes specifications from the geometry preceding dress-up features. This geometry can then be different from the initial geometry used to build dress-up features if you have inserted intermediate features.

Applying Parent/Children to a dress-up feature does not display the most recent geometry preceding the feature in the specification tree. The capability always displays the geometry initially used as the parent of the dress-up feature. Conversely, when editing a dress-up feature, the application always shows the geometry used to compute the feature. These different behaviors explain why for a given dress-up feature, the geometry displayed by the application depends on whether using Parent/Children or Edit. The parents displayed for a dress-up feature are not necessarily the features preceding it in the specification tree.

Thickness and Draft Features

If you want to see the parents of a feature built from a thickness or draft feature and additionally from geometry transformed by these features, these are not considered as parents of the selected feature. This explains why the graph will not show thicknesses and draft features in this context.

In the following example, applying Show Parents to the offset plane opens a graph showing only the pad and the edge fillet as the parents of the plane. The thickness feature is not considered as a parent because of the edge fillet generated from this thickness and before the plane.



Considering the same shape but this time with no edge fillet feature, the graph now shows the thickness as the parent of the plane.



Contextual Commands

Here is the exhaustive list of the diverse contextual commands allowing you to hide parents and children. These commands may prove quite useful whenever the view is overcrowded.


  • Show Parents and Children
  • Show Children
  • Show All Children
  • Hide Children
  • Show Parents
  • Show All Parents
  • Hide Parents