Hide Nodes in the Print

A Fault Tree often carries detail that is useful while working on it but not worth showing in the printed report: a branch under discussion, an area still being drafted, a level of breakdown the reader of the report does not need.

Any node can be marked as hidden in the print. The node is then left out of the printed diagram, and nothing else about it changes.

Warning

Hiding a node does not change any calculation. The probability, the minimal cutsets, the Basic Event tables and every other result keep taking the node into account exactly as before. It only changes what is drawn in the printed diagram.

Nodes are printed by default: a node is only left out after somebody hides it.

What happens to the branch

A child cannot be drawn without its parent, so hiding a gate leaves the whole branch hanging from it out of the print as well. Hiding a Basic Event, which has no children, only removes that event.

The rest of the diagram closes the gap: the nodes that are printed stay centred under their parent, as if the hidden ones were not there.

Hiding a node from the diagram

There are two ways of hiding the node that is selected in the diagram.

From the right-click menu

Right click on the node and select Hide Node (print). To print it again, select Show Node (print). Both options act on every node currently selected, so several nodes can be hidden in one go.

From the actions panel

Clicking on a node opens its panel on the right, with the properties of the node and the actions available for it. The Hide in print checkbox at the bottom tells whether the node is left out of the print, and ticking or unticking it applies the change straight away.

Reviewing what is hidden

A node that is not printed looks exactly like any other one in the diagram, so the toolbar has an eye icon, next to the Check the FT one, that opens the list of hidden nodes.

The modal lists, for each node, its ID, description, type and parent, and a Hidden checkbox:

• The Show dropdown filters the list. It opens on Hidden nodes only, which is the usual question (“what is being left out?”). Switching it to All nodes of the system lists everything, which is the quickest way of hiding several nodes at once.

• The Select all checkbox next to it ticks or unticks every row the filter is showing.

• Clicking the ID of a node closes the modal and centres the diagram on that node, to look at it before deciding.

• The counter shows how many nodes of the system are hidden.

Changes made here are applied when Save is pressed, and Close leaves everything as it was.

Note

The list covers the system that is loaded. A node hidden in another system of the project stays hidden there; open that system to review it.

Printing

Nothing else has to be done: the print, from the printer icon of the toolbar, already leaves the hidden nodes out. The Basic Event tables and the cutset lists of the report are not affected, since those are results and not the drawing of the tree.