Filter a structure

You filter a structure so that you can work with a specific product definition, which is smaller in size than the entire structure.

Restrictions and limitations

You can filter structures if your Teamcenter setup has the Context Management User and Smart Discovery licenses.. Additionally, you can filter only those structures that are indexed using Smart Discovery Indexing. Such structures can be identified by the Indexed indicator . Hovering over the indicator shows the start time of the last successful index update indicating whether the modified structure is available for filtering. You can further visualize the 3D design data of those structures if they are indexed for massive model visualization (MMV) using Smart Discovery Indexing. Such structures can be identified by the Massive model visualization indexed indicator .

Procedure Search for a structure, and click Open to open it.

Click Filter .

In the Filter panel, click Settings , enable or disable the following options, and click Apply:

Auto-update filters: By default, this option is enabled, and the structure is filtered in real-time as you apply each filter. When not enabled, you select all filters first and then apply them on the structure.

Filter/Append Elements with Children: By default, this option is enabled, and the children of the structure element selected as a filter are automatically added to the filter criteria. When not enabled, the children are not added to the filter criteria.

In the work area, right-click a structure element to choose a filter. The filters that you can choose and how these filters are applied on the structure depends on whether the administrator has configured the advanced search or not.

If the administrator has not configured the advanced search options, you can use filters such as Filter Selected Elements with children, Filter Selected Elements, Append Selected Elements with children, Append Selected Elements, and Exclude Selected Elements.

The filters are applied in groups. If the advanced search options are not configured, a maximum of three groups with the OR operator can be created and you can use the same filter expression in NX. The filters applied using the OR operator are always placed last in the filter criteria.

Sometimes, when you append selected elements with children, a filter applied using the OR operator overrides a filter applied using the NOT operator. For example, if you want to exclude FRONT_BUMPER_DC from the structure but want to append its parent CHASSIS-CK with children, FRONT_BUMPER_DC is automatically included in the structure.

If the administrator has configured the advanced search options, you can use filters such as Filter Selected Elements with children, Filter Selected Elements, and Exclude Selected Elements. The OR Group and NOT Group buttons are available in the Filter panel. You can use these buttons to create the filter expression which is a combination of the OR and NOT groups. You can create multiple OR groups in the expression but only one NOT group can exist in the filter expression. When the filter expression is a combination of OR groups and a NOT group, the filter shows all results from the OR groups by excluding the result from the NOT group.

If the administrator has configured a wild card search in the Teamcenter environment, in a text-based filter, you can use operators like Contains, Does not contain, Equals, Does not equal, Begins with, Ends with, and Like operators.

In a numeric filter, you can use operators like Greater than or equals, Greater than, Less than or equals, Less than, Equals, Does not equal, Range inclusive, and Range exclusive.

You can use an asterisk (*) to filter the parts in the structure.

In the Filter panel, apply additional filters, as required, such as by spatial proximity, spatial volume, spatial freeform zone, properties, or partitions.

As you select different filters in the Filter panel, an expression is built at the top. To remove any filter from the expression, click next to it. To remove all filters, click Clear All.

If you disabled auto-update, click Filter to filter the structure.

Note Filtering by spatial proximity and volume supports one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one alignments.

What to do next To view all the structure elements including the ones that are not displayed due to the applied filters, click Configure > Show Excluded by Filtering. You can save the filtered structure in a workset or session for easy retrieval.