Understanding the Suppression Feature in BricsCAD

Quick answer: Suppression temporarily hides a set of entities by internally placing them on a special frozen layer, speeding up orbit, zoom, and pan operations, improving selection performance, and reducing regeneration time on complex drawings. Suppressed entities are also excluded from mass properties calculations, and a parametrically-driven condition can suppress or unsuppress a set automatically to generate different design variants.

Creating a Suppression Feature

Run SUPPRESS.

Managing Suppression Features

Select the suppression feature in the Mechanical Browser panel and right-click for these options:

• Suppress: suppresses the entity set. Its icon changes to Suppressed, and the menu option itself then reads Unsuppress.
• Unsuppress: reverses this. The icon changes to Unsuppressed, and the option reads Suppress again.
• Dissolve: deletes the suppression feature entirely, rather than just unsuppressing its entities.
• Edit Selection: add or remove entities from the set; every current member highlights. Select entities to add them, hold Shift and select to remove them, then right-click to stop editing.
• Zoom to: zooms onto the selected entities. Build a selection by clicking a suppression feature (selects all its members), expanding it and clicking an individual entity, or holding Ctrl to add or remove entities from the current selection.
• Select: selects every member of a suppression feature at once.

Setting a Condition

A suppression feature can be driven by an expression, automatically suppressing or unsuppressing its entities based on the expression’s current value.

Via the Mechanical Browser panel:

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

Via the Parameters Manager panel:

1. Select the parameter sharing the suppression feature’s name (searchable the same way).
2. Enter an expression in the Expression field.

Either way, the logic is the same: if the value equals zero, every entity displays; any other value suppresses them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between Unsuppress and Dissolve? Unsuppress just reverses the suppressed state, the feature itself stays intact and can be suppressed again later. Dissolve deletes the suppression feature entirely.

What value should a condition expression have to keep entities visible? Zero. Any non-zero value suppresses the entities instead.

Does suppressing entities affect mass properties calculations? Yes, suppressed entities are excluded from mass properties calculations, including generated drawing views and bills of materials.

Can I use suppression to create different variants of the same parametric design? Yes, tie the condition to a parametrically-driven expression, and different parameter values will suppress or reveal different entity sets automatically.