What is the Purpose of Construction Work Points

[C_Haines_ENG]

Hello all, I've stumbled across the option to create a "Construction" work point. What is the point of these? It says they cant be seen in the tree and cant be seen visually, and they also don't seem to be able to be deleted unless you delete it right after making it. 

What are these used for? I'd like to create workpoints and hide them from the user, but I still need to be able to see if they are there and to use them.

[WCrihfield · Accepted solution]

Hi @C_Haines_ENG.  I honestly do not think I have ever really used them for anything important before.  Once they are created, they will be included in the total count of WorkPoints, and can still be deleted again, by iterating through the WorkPoints collection, checking if each one is construction, and if so, delete it.  When I attempted to assign names to them, just after creation, it did not throw any error.  But when iterating through them in a second rule run, they did not appear to retain those names, because the Name property seemed empty.  So, they may be useful for temporary 3D construction geometry, in the process of defining or getting to the locations / angle / rotation that you want to create 'real' geometry, but after that, I guess it is up to our needs as to if we then delete/eliminate them, if they no longer seem necessary.  The 2 primary differences between 'work features' and 'transient' features is:  work features will still exist after the code has finished, and work features generally/usually require constraints as part of how they are defined.  We can turn the visibility of 'regular' WorkFeatures off after we create them, but that obviously leaves a trail in the model tree.  Even the 'fixed' WorkPoint has a 'fixed/grounded' type constraint on it to hold it in place (and hold on to the location information, in reference to the component definition it was created within), where a transient point simply ceases to exist.

I think back to my time in college/university while learning how to do things with manual drafting tools, and true engineering, geometry, physics knowledge, without the help of a sophisticated CAD system to help us.  We needed 'LOTS' of construction geometry for some of the stuff we did.  Sometimes that construction geometry was erased/deleted afterwards, but sometimes it was kept, to show how we got to where we did.  The imagination is the limit where construction geometry is involved.

[C_Haines_ENG]

I think I've figured out what issue I was having. I will see if you can actually assign an iFeature point to them in the future, because having those points not seen by the user would be very ideal. 

I was trying to use a FindByPoint to make sure I wasn't double adding points, but I forgot you need to set the VisibleOnly option to False to see those construction points. Whoops.