Engineering Tools

Regions to Groups

Engineering Tools — Regions to Groups (00326)

What this tool does

For every connection region in the active model (or a user-picked subset), creates a FEMAP group with the same entity contents. Group titles are prefixed REGION: so the new groups sort together in the Model Info tree.

Why this exists

FEMAP has no native bulk Region→Group conversion. The built-in right-click "Add to Group" pattern operates one region at a time, which becomes painful on any model with more than a handful of connectors. Regions to Groups sweeps the whole model in one click.

What it’s good for

  • Visualizing what’s in each region. Groups are first-class citizens in FEMAP’s view tools — you can hide / show / color by group, but you cannot do the same directly with connection regions. Promoting regions to groups gives you the visualization controls.
  • Feeding region contents into downstream tools. Anything that consumes a group — color-by-group, output filters, mass-compute, freebody summation — can now operate on a region without re-picking the contents.
  • Isolating a region for inspection. Toggle the region’s new group on by itself to see exactly what nodes / edges / surfaces / elements it captures.

How to use it

  1. Open from Custom Tools > Model Audit - Query > Regions to Groups, or from Custom Tools > Model Organization (the tool is registered in both menus because it sits naturally in either category).
  2. Choose "Prompt for region selection" if you want to convert a subset, or leave it unchecked to convert all connection regions in the model.
  3. Choose "Skip if group already exists" if you may have already run the tool and want to leave any pre-existing REGION: … groups alone. Unchecked, the tool overwrites.
  4. Click OK. Each region’s entity list is retrieved via IConnectionRegion.GetEntityList() and added to the new group via feGroup.SetAdd.

Output

One group per converted region. The new groups appear in the Model Info tree under Groups with titles of the form REGION: <region title>. The message window prints a one-line summary per region (id, entity count, action taken).

Related tools

  • Group DMIG Nodes — similar idea for a different entity class: makes a group from the grids referenced by DMIG matrices.
  • Merge Props — if your connection regions are pointing at duplicate connection properties, that tool can collapse them first so the resulting groups are cleaner.