How can I determine the entity or geometry type of a selected entity?

joshtargo

Do I need to have a qGeometry for every possible type, or is there a way for it to just look at a query and tell me what it is?

jelte_steur_info

check out:

evCurveDefinition

and

evSurfaceDefinition (context is Context, arg is map) returns map

Return a descriptive value for a face, or the first face if the query finds more than one. Return a Cone, Cylinder, Plane, Sphere, Torus, or BSplineSurface as appropriate for the face, or an unspecified map value if the face is none of these with surfaceType filled of type SurfaceType

joshtargo

I was hoping there was a function that simply tells you what kind of entity something is. I want the user to be able to click on a vertex, edge, arc, circle, or face, but the processing is different depending on which one it is.

MichaelPascoe

@joshtargo Well, there is, it's qEntityType. But that gets you one of the following: Vertex, Edge, Face, or Body. If you want it to return the geometry type, you could do qGeometryType. If you want the body type then qBodyType. I recommend making a custom function to use all of them together to return a custom type from a custom enum. You can do the initial filtering with qEntityType, then from there use evCurveDefinition or evSurfaceDefinition to get specifics.

I imagine you could do it in 10 minutes 😎. Then save it to your FS library where you can import it and re-use it per project.

joshtargo

Do t I need to use the specific types I'm looking for as arguments for those functions? I wanted something that returns "vertex" or "arc"

MichaelPascoe

If you want the query for specific entity types, you can do something like this:

const vertexQuery = qEntityFilter(queryToFilter, EntityType.VERTEX));
const edgeQuery = qEntityFilter(queryToFilter, EntityType.EDGE));
const faceQuery = qEntityFilter(queryToFilter, EntityType.FACE));
const bodyQuery = qEntityFilter(queryToFilter, EntityType.BODY));

const isVertex = !isQueryEmpty(context, vertexQuery));
const isEdge = !isQueryEmpty(context, edgeQuery));
const isFace = !isQueryEmpty(context, faceQuery));
const isBody = !isQueryEmpty(context, bodyQuery));

For finding an arc it could be more like this:

// No doubt there are cleaner ways to do this, I'm just throwing something out there for you to start. 
// Also, the try catch doesn't work well, so perhaps this isn't the best approach. 
// I would expect the "try" to forget the attempt if it fails, but for some reason this isn't 
// the case with FeatureScript, which makes the try/catch pointless if it will not consistently trigger the 
// catch and forget what happened in the try. As you can tell… I've had some bones to pick in the past with FS try/catch.


const isEdge = !isQueryEmpty(context, qEntityFilter(queryToFilter, EntityType.EDGE)));
var isArc = false;

if (isEdge)
{
  try silent
  {
      var radius = evCurveDefinition(context, {
                      "edge" : definition.entitiesArray[0]
                  }).radius;
  
      isArc = true;
  }
}

joshtargo

its similar to what I ended up doing, I guess there is no built in function that returns an entity type, which seems strange.

joshtargo

My solution was: