Logo NORICAD
START YOUR TRIAL

How to Use the Structure Panel in BricsCAD

Quick answer: The Structure panel shows your whole drawing as a tree, organised by whatever rules a Structure Tree Configuration (CST) file defines, letting you filter, group, and sort entities to select and edit them in bulk. BricsCAD ships six built-in configurations, and you can build your own custom ones too.

The 6 Built-in Structure Tree Configurations

Quick Examples: Selecting and Deleting Entities

Delete every entity on a specific layer (Default configuration):

  1. Open the Structure panel and select the Default configuration from its drop-down menu.
  2. Expand the Entities node. Everything in the drawing is listed, grouped by Layer.
  3. Click the layer you want. Every entity on it gets selected in Model space automatically.
  4. Press Delete.

Delete every line in the drawing (Mechanical configuration):

  1. Open the Structure panel and select the Mechanical configuration from its drop-down menu.
  2. Expand the Entities node. Everything is listed, grouped by Entity type instead.
  3. Click the Lines node. Every line in the drawing gets selected automatically.
  4. Press Delete.

How Rules Work

A Structure Tree Configuration is built from rules, evaluated top-down. Every entity in the drawing is tested against each rule’s filters in order; if it doesn’t match, it passes down to the next rule. As soon as at least one entity matches a rule, that rule gets its own node in the tree, with its entities organised according to that rule’s grouping and sorting settings.

Position matters, since the whole thing is hierarchical: use the Move property up/down buttons in the Configure Structure Tree dialog to reorder rules and properties.

Filters

Filters decide whether an entity gets listed under a given rule. One important limitation: filters check whether an entity has a certain property, not what its value is. Filtering on “Dim style,” for example, includes every entity with any dimension style at all, every dimension, essentially, but you can’t filter specifically for “Dim style equals ISO-25.”

Filters are additive: adding a second property to the same rule’s filter means entities matching either property get included, not just entities matching both. Add a property via the Add rule or property button on the rule’s Filter node; the order you add them in doesn’t matter.

Click Toggle negation on a filter to exclude matching entities instead of including them, shown with a “!” before the filter’s name.

A rule with no filters at all acts as a catchall, picking up anything the rules above it didn’t match. Any rule placed directly beneath a no-filter rule will never get any entities, since nothing’s left to filter by the time it’s checked.

Grouping and Sorting

Group controls how entities within a rule are organised in the tree; the order you list grouping properties in determines the nesting. Move Layer above Entity Type, for instance, and entities are grouped by layer first, then sub-grouped by type; reverse the order and you get the opposite. With no grouping properties at all, entities just show as a flat list.

Sort controls the order entities appear in within the deepest branch, labelled by their sorting property’s value as a flat list rather than further sub-nodes. If you’ve added more than one sorting property, whichever one actually applies to a given entity first is the one used to label it.

The Two Predefined Rules

The Default configuration ships with two rules already set up:

Building a Custom Filter: Grouping All Dimensions Together

To pull every dimension in a drawing into its own node:

  1. Right-click your drawing’s name in the Structure panel and choose Configure to open the Configure Structure Tree dialog.
  2. Go to File > Save as…, and give the new configuration a name, for example dim_filter. CST files save to the Support folder by default: C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Bricsys\BricsCAD\V26x64\en_US\Support.
  3. On the Group/Sort tab, click Add rule or property. A new rule appears at the end of the list.
  4. Rename the new rule to Dimensions. This step is essential; without a distinct name, it won’t actually filter anything in the panel.
  5. Select the Dimensions rule’s Filter node, click Add rule or property, and the Select property dialog opens.
  6. In the search field, the source instructions say to type “dym style” and use Find next (or Enter) to jump to an “Angular dimension Dym style” property. Elsewhere on this same page, the equivalent property is referred to as “Dim style.” This inconsistency is in Bricsys’s own documentation; it isn’t clear whether “Dym” is a genuine distinct internal property name or a typo, so search for whichever spelling your version of the dialog actually shows.
  7. Click OK to add the property to the rule.
  8. Select the Dimensions rule and click Move property up until it sits above the Entities rule. Order matters here: if Dimensions stayed below the no-filter Entities catchall, it would never receive any entities.

Once done, the Dimensions node in the Structure panel shows every dimension in the drawing in one place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I filter for a specific property value, like a dimension style named “ISO-25”? No. Filters only check whether an entity has a given property at all, not what its value is.

What happens if two filters are added to the same rule? They’re additive: an entity matching either filter gets included, not only entities matching both.

Why did my new rule not filter anything even though I added a property? Check two things: that you renamed the rule (an unnamed new rule won’t take effect), and that it’s positioned above any no-filter catchall rule, like the default Entities rule, rather than below it.

Where do custom Structure Tree Configuration files get saved? The Support folder by default: C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Bricsys\BricsCAD\V26x64\en_US\Support.

Powered by DIT Innovations