Metadata - Filtering and Selecting

The Controls at the bottom are very powerful to use as a filtering and selection tool in one of three ways:

• Add or Remove properties from the Live Edit list
• To make a selection based on a specific property
• Filter and select elements that have a specific property value

Let us look at these in more detail.

The four buttons shown below have the following Functions:

1. The ‘plus’ allows us to add properties not in the Live edit list of properties

2. The ‘X’ sets a property to undefined, which effectively means that it is ignored

3. The Selection button will add to the selection based on a selected property, adding any elements that HAVE that property value to the selection

4. The Filter button will select only elements that have a specific value, effectively de-selecting all elements that HAVE NOT got that property value.

Let us look at the four elements in the example to clarify.

We have two identical walls, one slab and one column.

We will focus on only one single property namely ‘Combustible’ to explain the selection functionality.

In the diagram below the ‘Combustible’ property is set as indicated

Let us look at point 3, Selection and 4, Filter first.

Once we have selected all 4 these Elements we will now see the following in the Metadata palette.

 

We can see it corresponds with the values from before. If we were to select the ‘True’ value from the Metadata palette and Click on 4, Filter, it will deselect the other elements and only retain the two elements that have that value in the selection.

 

and only those elements with that property value remain selected

Inversely we could select one of these elements, and select the property to add to the selection.

This will add any elements with the Same value to the selection.

We can also utilise the add and delete properties with Live edit switched off to manipulate properties as we see fit.