PRIMER 22.1

Options: Managing Saved Properties

Hovering the cursor over the Save P (or SP i/j ) button maps the Save Props popup in which you can select Options to control saved properties.

The Saved properties panel may also be invoked directly from the [Display] popup, or by keyboard short-cut key "~" (Tilde).

This panel lists the current saved properties status, in this example currently at state 2 of 2, and allows you to select a saved property state directly by number.

Clear all saved properties deletes all saved properties in memory.

Saved Attributes lets you control which components of a property are updated when you navigate to a saved property. All attributes are always saved , this controls what is updated when the property is restored .

Blanking, Colour, Transparency and Plotting mode are all attributes of the items in a model.

A saved property always contains all these attributes for all items in a model, regardless of whether or not they are currently visible. If items are added to the model after the property was saved their attributes will not be stored, since they weren't known about at the time of saving, so they will not be updated when the property is restored. (See below for further notes on the effects of changing model contents.)

Entity and Label switches are the settings in the Entity panel and are model independent. A saved property contains the current status of all such switches for all possible item types, whether or not they are present in a given model.
Viewing parameters are also model independent. The scale, orientation, location and perspective settings are stored.

[ Reset attributes... ] Allows you to reset any or all of these attributes for all models.

The effect on a saved property of changing model contents

In order to be economical of memory the model-dependent data in a saved property is stored in "runlength encoded" form. This utilises the fact that in most models a sequence of items will all have the same visual attributes, for example all elements in a part will tend to have the same colour, transparency, etc. Therefore for a given item the property data each row is saved (qualitatively) as:

Label A

Label B

Property information

All items lying in the label range A to B implicitly have the same Blanking, Colour, Transparency and Display mode.

Therefore when the model is changed the following happens:

Change made to model	Consequence when a saved property is restored
Items in the range A to B are deleted	If the deleted items lie within this range, but do not include either A or B themselves, then there is no effect. If either item A or B are deleted then the whole of this "row" of properties is lost, and on a subsequent restore items within this range will not be updated.
New items are added	Items added within an existing label range A to B will automatically be included within that range, and their properties will be updated on a restore. Items outside any saved range will not be updated since they were not known about when the property was saved. Where new items overlap an existing A .. B range then only the subset lying within that range will be updated.
Existing items are renumbered	Internally PRIMER stores the item "object" rather than just its label, so renumbering objects automatically updates their label ranges in saved property rows of data. Therefore if existing label range A .. B is modified to A' .. B' all items within that new range will be updated as before, but this might or might not include the same range of items. If the new range is invalid, for example B' is now less than A', then no update will take place.

It will be clear that the logic above is not perfect, and that changing a model may well invalidate some or all saved properties. This is an inevitable consequence of the compact storage method used, and is considered to be a reasonable compromise. Storing data in a "change resistant" form would require many orders of magnitude more memory, and this could have unacceptable side-effects on the performance of the code.

Export to file... saving properties to file

The complete contents of either the current property state 0 only, or all saved property states, can be saved to an external properties file.

This is an ASCII (human-readable) file that is designed to be both programme and model independent, and its format is given below.

The next free filename in the sequence < jobname >_nnn.prp will be presented as the default name, but you are free to use any name. Extension " .prp " is recommended though for compatibility with other Oasys LS-DYNA Environment software.

Import from file... reloading properties from file

A previously saved file of properties can be reloaded into memory in this PRIMER session, either replacing any existing properties or appending them to the current list.

The most recently created file in the sequence < jobname >_nnn.prp will be presented as the default filename and if, as here, no such file exists it will be listed on a red background and you will have to specify an alternative.

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