KCL standard library hide() function

[franknoirot]

In all traditional CAD programs there is an entity tree showing each of the operations performed on your entities, and these components allow the user to toggle the visibility/inclusion of that entity in the part/assembly on and off. Here is SolidWorks' documentation on theirs, for example, which has different configurable views:

Other examples like the feature tree in Onshape allow users to toggle the visibility of features. How would we do this in our code-first paradigm?

I propose we add a hide() function that does the following:

1. suppresses rendering of that entity
2. suppresses inclusion of that entity in exports

But which importantly does not break features later in the model that rely upon it. This is why I do not think another approach like commenting out code would work to support a show/hide toggle in the feature tree.

A hidden sketch, for example:

1. can still be used in an extrusion
2. cannot be edited (until it is toggled back to being shown)

[franknoirot]

This is thorny. If you sketch on the face of an extrusion and then extrude from that sketch, what of the following can you do?

1. Toggle the sketch that created the first extrusion (I would think yes)
2. Toggle the first extrusion to hidden (I would think no, or it toggles everything that depends on it)
3. Toggle the sketch on face (I would think yes)
4. Toggle the final extrusion (I would think yes but I don't know if that breaks engine behavior because we fuse the extrusion bodies)

[franknoirot]

A potential nice scope decrease for this would be to make hide() only available for:

1. SketchGroup
2. Plane

That would align with Onshape's feature tree UI, which allows toggling of visibility of Sketches and default planes but not Extrusions, Fillets, or even Offset Surfaces

[franknoirot]

I've talked myself out of this because both those use cases can be handled outside of KCL:

1. SketchGroup: Sketches are rendered client-side so there is no visual-decluttering that needs to take place in our 3D view: your sketch is implicitly "hidden" as soon as you exit sketch mode
2. Plane: The default planes are not handled in KCL so their toggle functionality will not be a code mod by necessity. I don't know if we'll support offset planes of those default ones but they can be handled other ways.