Vectorworks Tip #147 – Basic Tools – Class Options

One of the class options I’m not very keen on is Active Only. The reason I don’t like this very much is that always causes trouble with objects that are inside groups or symbols. It goes back to the basic concepts of Vectorworks that groups and symbols are container objects that have classes separate from the objects inside the container.

I was reading about somebody’s problem on the Vectorworks community board where they had objects on two different classes inside a symbol. The symbol used the class of one of those objects, let’s call them Class A and Class B. The symbol itself use the class Class A.
 
 
 
If you set your class options to Active Only, and you make Class A the active class, you won’t see the object on class B.
However, if you make Class B the active class, you will not see anything inside the symbol because the the symbol (the container part) has been assigned to Class A, meaning that it disappears. And when the container disappears, everything inside the symbol disappears as well.