Opening CATIA Version 4 Models in CATIA Version 5

This task shows you how to open a CATIA Version 4 model in CATIA Version 5. You can find additional information about:
You may want to customize certain settings before proceeding with this task. For more information, see Customizing Compatibility Settings.

  1. Click the Open icon or select the File>Open command. The File Selection dialog box appears.

  2. In this box, find the directory specified above.

  3. Either select XWINGS.model and click on the Open button or double-click it. Where there are many different types of files, it may be useful to click the Files of type list and specify model as the document type. The following document will appear:

In CATIA V5, this model is Read-Only and therefore cannot be modified.
 

Limited and pre-defined Number of Tab Pages:

Opening a Model with many tab pages may sometimes lead to high memory consumption.

The user can choose to open a model with a limited number of tab pages. For this, the number of tab pages will be pre-defined by an environment variable:

  • On Windows: set MDL_WSP_NB=number of tab pages
  • On UNIX: export MDL_WSP_NB=number of tab pages

The default value will be fixed to 50 tab pages.

In case of limitation, a warning will appear, indicating that the number of workspaces has been reduced.
  • If, in CATIA Version 4, you defined specific views for a model by means of IMAGE/WINDOW+DEFINE, you can still use these views by clicking the View>Defined Views... command.
  • For other ways of opening existing CATIA Version 4 models, see "Opening Existing Documents" and "Opening Most Recently Used Documents" in the CATIA - Infrastructure User's Guide.
  • V4 models residing on UNIX can be accessed from Windows using the http protocol. (Make sure beforehand that an http server has been installed on the machine where the models reside.) The address to be specified should look something like this: http://UNIXserver: port/V4modellocation
   
 

Visualization of the Icon showing the Hide / Show Status of V4 Elements

There is a new visual information in the specification tree: a new icon is available for V4 data (models, libraries) opened in CATIA V5.

Moreover, the nodes of the Master, the Sets and the Geometric elements have an associated icon showing the Hide / Show status. It is now possible to see the Hide status applied on V4 elements (opened in CATIA V5), thanks to this symbol . But the Subsets do not have any icon.

To switch an object from the Show space to the No Show space (and vice versa), you select a V4 element and press the Hide / Show button , the V4 element's icon changes from to in the Specification Tree. This facilitates the browsing of a CATIA V4 model in the V4 model Editor or when it is inserted in a Product.

In a model's specification tree, the subset nodes listed in the table below are not present in the V4 data structure. They are specially created in CATIA V5 for the convenience of the users so that they can group per types the elements of a geometrical set. Those nodes can be selected for Hide / Show operation, but the Hide / Show command is applied to the children of the subset node, and not directly to the node.
 

V4 Elements

 The Hide mode is set upon the PT node: only the sub-elements are impacted by the No Show mode in the Specification Tree:

SOL, FAC, AXS, BOX, CCV, CNP, CRV, CPT,
DIT, DRW, ITM, LN, OCP, PLN, POL, PT,
SKI, SOL, SPC, STR, SPC, SUR, USR, VOL.

In this example, all the elements of *SET1 are visible except the points in *PT that are in Hide mode.

There is no symbol in the Specification tree for the *PT subset, even if the Hide mode has been set on it.
But the geometry of all its children (*PT1, *PT2, etc...) is not visible because they inherit this graphic property (Hide / Show status) from their father.

Subset nodes such as PT, LN, SOL, DIT, do not have associated icons as they have no visualization status. The Hide / Show command on a subset node is directly applied on its children. So the children's nodes have their icons changed.

Then, if you apply the command a second time on the same node during the same session, all its children return to the Show space.
   
 

It allows you to see in the specification tree if the element corresponding to a node is in Hide or Show state. Browsing CATIA V4 data becomes easier with this new functionality. Indeed, it is not necessary to swap between the Show and Hide spaces (command Swap visible space) to find the visualization state of each element from the geometry. The behavior is homogeneous with what is done for CATIA V5 data.
For more information, please refer to Hide and Showing Objects, in the Infrastructure User's Guide.