Feature Cuts specify the shape, size, and manner by which material is removed from Plate parts, Profile parts, and Members.
For more information about feature cuts, see the Structural Detailing Help.
End-users at the production yard employ cutting machines to cut steel from different vendors. Each cutting machine vendor understands its own specification for how material should be removed from steel. These are called proprietary Cutting Macros.
The Cutting Macro Definition is a XML file that specifies to the Cutting Macro Rule how a set of (one or more) feature cuts maps to a Cutting Macro. It also specifies how the attributes of the Cutting Macro should be computed.
Organization of Cutting Macro Definition Library
The out-of-the-box library of macro definitions is delivered to the [Product Folder]\SharedContent\StructManufacturing\SMS_SCHEMA\Macro\Vendor\S3D folder.
A visual breakdown of the folders in the Macro path is shown below:
The Cutting Macro rule creates the Cutting Macro business objects from macros that are defined in the Cutting Macro definition library. This Cutting Macro definition library consists of XML files that define the individual macros and a MacroLibrary.xml file that maps all the definition XMLs into one file and makes them searchable by cross-section. An example of some nodes in the MacroLibrary.xml file is shown below.
The above example includes several entity references (&C001 and &GM001). These entity references refer to other individual XML files that become part of the XML document that reference them. And these entity references are the individual macro definitions that maps to one or more feature-cuts. Below is an example of an individual macro definition that becomes part of the Macro Library for Tubular members:
