CATIA V5 – Search

The Search command is very useful for searching and selecting elements. It is possible to search:

• Elements with a specific name, type, or color,
• Visible or hidden objects, lines of a specific type or thickness
• Elements according to specific attributes (material, dimensions, ...),
• Objects created using a specific work environment (Workbench),
• Documents created by CATIA V4.

At the same time, it is possible to open several Search menus. If an order was active before the Search menu is started, it remains active. Once Search and the menu appears, all other commands can be used without any icons or context menu.

The command runs through Edit / Search or a combination of the CTRL + F key.  

If the Pre-highlight option is turned on (the default is turned on), the items found by the search will be highlighted on the tree and on the model itself. If the option is not activated, the items will be found but will not be highlighted. This feature can also be used in combination with a predefined maximum number of elements that will be highlighted. The search icon  will find all the required items, but the items will not be selected, as opposed to the search icon and selection for which the items were found immediately and selected.

Include topology

If you are searching for topological objects (in the Workbench list, select Topology), the topology criterion can only be combined with the type of object. Another way to search topology is to enable the Include topology option. This option includes topological objects (surfaces, edges, points, ...) regardless of the type of search, so it is possible to combine color search. If Include topology is enabled, there is no need to set the Topology search in the Workbench list. In this way, apart from the topology, other objects are searched according to the given criteria. It should be kept in mind that this kind of search takes more time.

Published elements only

Turning on the Published elements the only option limits the number of search elements to only those items that are published. Therefore, the elements found will be only those that are published. Click More to open additional search options. Within Line properties, it is possible to choose a line type and thickness. It is also possible to search according to the appearance of the symbol. In addition, it is possible to set up graphics features (Layer and Visibility).

Once the search criteria are set, they can also be saved or added to Favorites for future searches, by clicking on the icon  . This will open a new window into which the search name can be entered. 

When a new command is launched, add a search type is visible in the Favorites menu.

By searching topology sometimes it is possible to shorten the design time of the model significantly. The following example shows how to add curves to all edges of a simple model.

By topology search, all the edges on the model were selected, and Edge Fillet option added a rounding to all edges.