When I clicked the CAD Entity Groups function (from SolidWorks which is my CAD tool) and if there are existing groups, I noticed those groups in the pop-up window "Grouping Geometric Entities" were auto-expanded and the highlighter was always rested on the bottommost group. If I wanted to check or review a particular part or parts in a specific group, it would require me to do the following processes:
- Click and hold the window, then move it toward to a more central area of screen. This is because it always popped up on the upper left corner of screen where it blocked the SolidWorks FeatureManager design tree.
- Hold the LMB (Left Mouse Button) on the window's slider bar and move it all way to top.
- Click the "-" sign in front of each group to collapse it until all groups were collapsed so that I could see all existing groups.
- Look carefully at all groups because it seemed to be sorted in an order unknown to me, and locate the one I need. Then I finally could expand the specific group to examine its contents.
You can imagine this is a quite tedious an inefficient process. I would suggest the following improvements:
- Let the window popped up at the place where it was closed last time. The default position could be set at the center of screen, as almost everyone's design tree is on the left-hand side of screen regardless what CAD tool is being used.
- Sort the existing groups alphabetically.
- Make those groups initially auto-collapsed, and rest the highlighter on the topmost group.
After expanding the specific group that I went to examine and found a few entities required to be removed, I could only remove them one at a time. If there were Ctrl+LMB and Shift+LMB functions to allow multiple selections at a time, it would increase the user efficiency by aligning with the Windows experience (my OS is Microsoft Windows based).
Now, say, I also wanted to create a new group. I went to start picking entities for that group. I could see the first picked entity shown under the new group name. As I went along picking more entities, it appeared to me that they were not shown up in the Grouping Geometric Entities window. Then I realized the slider bar was slightly moving while I was picking more entities. It turned out those picked entities were appended in the same group under the first picked entity. This process would made the verification of entity picking harder. I would suggest that rather making the slider bar moving, it might be easier to verify if the entire expanded group were moving upward so that the newly picked entity would always appear at the bottom of the visible region inside this window.
This is how I would hope the CAD Entity Groups could be improved.
