Filter Selection

The documents to be processed can be selected by using a filter. To use the filtering options available in the Filter Selections dialog box, clear the existing document selection applied in the Batch Operation dialog box first. Then define the desired filters to select the desired documents using the options available in the Filter Selections dialog box.

File types:

The file types determines the documents to be selected when the filter has been applied.

Parts	Select this option to select the part documents.
Assemblies	Select this option to select the assembly documents.
Drawings referencing part	Select this option to select drawings referring to a part opened for the batch operation.
Drawings referencing assembly	Select this option to select drawings referring to an assembly opened for the batch operation.

When using the Custom properties based filters, these document type filters should not be used to avoid unexpected issues on the documents' final selection based on the filter set up.

Filter documents by CustomProperties:

You can filter selection of the documents in a batch operation using the CustomProperties that have the Display in Print and Convert option selected in their settings. The Display in Print and Convert option is located in the Additional Options page of the CustomProperty Wizard.

CustomProperties that does not have the Display in Print and Convert option selected, are not shown in the drop-down menu associated to the When column box.

When column	Select the CustomProperty which value is compared with the search string specified in the has value box.
has value	Search string to be looked for from the CustomProperty selected in the When column box.
Select or clear file	Select this to apply the CustomProperty based selection filter to documents on click of the Select or Clear button.
Select or clear referencing drawing	Select this to apply the CustomProperty based selection filter to referencing drawings on click of the Select or Clear button.

Apply filter:

Select	Select all the documents based on the options selected under the File types.
Clear	Clear selection of the documents based on the options selected under the File types.

Examples:

Filtering the Document Selection in the Batch Operation

Before you start:

Before you proceed forward in this example, please ensure that you have the desired batch operation profile for drawings selected and, no documents are already selected in the Batch Operation dialog box. If you do not have a batch operation profile selected or, if you have any document selected in the Batch Operation dialog box, please use the following instructions to clear the existing selection:

Close the Filter Selections dialog box.
Select the desired batch operation profile from the Print Profile tab for batch printing documents and/or from the File Conversion tab for the batch file conversion operation.
Right-click any document in the Select documents to process list and select Clear Selection.

Once the batch operation profile is selected and an existing selection is cleared, click the Filter command to re-enter the Filter Selections dialog box and proceed forward with this example.

Example Case - A Family Car:

Let's assume we have an assembly representing a family car which have five doors. A car have then two doors to the front seats, two doors to the back seats and a door to access the trunk. You have made some changes to the design of the back seat doors and you need to provide the changes to e.g. a sub-contractor who manufactures the doors. So probably you do not want to print all drawings related to an assembly again just because of this minor change.

In this case, the Filter Selections feature in CustomTools Batch Operation is very useful because you can determine the drawings and/or the specific sheets to print by a rule based on the CustomProperty value. You may have created another revision of the back doors which have your latest design changes included in so, you can have your Revision property allowed in the Batch Operation by the Display in Print and Convert option and use the revision identifier as a criteria to select the documents in your batch operation.

So let's say the car's primary revision have an identifier A1 so all components including the main assembly itself have revision A1 written into SOLIDWORKS document. Due to your design changes in the back doors, the back doors' revision is now A2.

In this case we use the Custom properties options available in the Filter Selections dialog box. Select Revision from the drop-down menu associated to the When column box and then type A2 into the has value box. As mentioned above, we would like to provide just the new drawings to the sub-contractor so in addition to the CustomProperty based filter it is now vice to restrict the document selection to the drawings. To scope this batch operation just to the SOLIDWORKS drawing documents, select also the Select or clear referencing drawing option.

By the filtering rule set up in this example, we select all drawings referencing to the models that have a value A2 written into a CustomProperty called Revision.