Understanding Group

To start the group LD Assistant and AutoCAD are not like group in other CAD progrm, with the LD group if you turn it off you can remove an object in the group and when you trun the group back on... they are all grouped togather. Moerover you can move an object in a group without haveing to ungroup. With that said lets start.

The Group command does not appear in the toolbars or menus, nor does it have a keyboard shortcut. While group as many more fontions, we will only go ove the baices.

Start the command, by typing group and hit the enter key.

You are now presented with the dialog box shown in figure 1.

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Figure 1.
Object Grouping dialog box.

Type a name in the Group Name box. If you want, you can click on the Description box and enter an explanatory note. (Tables, Truss, Fixtures ... ect;)

Now pick the New button. The dialog box collapses and now click on all the objects that you want in that group. After you have selected all the objects, hit the enter button and the dialog box reappears, now the the upper portion displays your group name.

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Figure 2.
Click an object to grip-edit the entire group.

Now when you click and drag a blue grip, that one object moves independently within the group. When you press Esc to clear the grips, the entire group becomes selectable again.

The Group dialog box offers several other useful functions. For example, have you lost track of a group's name? No problem. Pick Find Name. The dialog box collapses and you're invited to select an object. If you select one that belongs to a group, a box pops up listing the group name or names. An object can belong to more than one group.

If you pick a group name from the upper window of the Group dialog box, another inquiry function becomes available, as do several Change Group functions at the bottom of the dialog box. Figure 3 shows an example of this.

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Figure 3.
By select a group name you activate the Change Group buttons.

The function of most buttons is obvious from their labels, but one or two have a bit of a twist.

  • You can Highlight a group, which temporarily collapses the dialog box and highlights all objects visible on screen that belong to the group.
  • You can Remove objects from or Add them to the current group.
  • You can Rename a group.
  • You can change the Description.
  • You can Explode a group. This is not like Selectable/Nonselectable. Once you explode a group, you lose the association among its objects and its name no longer exists.
  • You can make a group Selectable or Nonselectable.
  • You can Reorder a group, which is a little esoteric. When you create a group, the objects are added to it in the order in which you select them. By reordering a group, you can change the relative positions of objects within the group listing, which has an effect on which items end up on top when a drawing regens or redraws. This is effectively a mini Draworder command within the group.

Now that you have seen the basic mechanism for creating, using, and editing groups, here are a few other significant points: A group can contain any type of AutoCAD object, including lines, circles, arcs, polylines, text, dimensions, block insertions, and other groups.

  • An object can belong to more than one group. To select an object within an existing group so that it's part of a new group, the existing group must be nonselectable. If it's selectable, the entire group that it's within becomes part of the new group.
  • If you're building a selection set for an editing command and pick an object that belongs to more than one group, all objects in all groups of which it's a member will be selected.
  • If you copy, mirror, or array a group, all the new objects you create belong to a new unnamed group. The original group is unchanged.
  • If you insert another drawing from disk into the current drawing, any groups it may have contained won't carry forward into the current drawing. The same holds true for xrefs.
  • You aren't limited to using groups to add to a current selection set you're building for an editing command. You can also Remove objects in a group from a current selection set.
  • If you're building a block definition and include an object that's a member of a selectable group, all objects in the group become part of the block definition and the group disappears.
  • If you're building a block definition and include an object that's a member of a nonselectable group, the object transfers to the block definition. It's no longer a member of the group, but the rest of the group remains unscathed.