Since PLAXIS 2D AE, the user interface supports a smart selection option to select multiple connected lines with the same user features, e.g. plates or line loads.
To use this selection method, hold down the SHIFT button and click on a line with such a feature.

The program will then automatically select this line plus the connected lines that have the same feature (e.g. a plate, or a line load): at each connected side of the line, the program will check if it can find one connect line that has at least one of the user features from the original line, and then adds this to the selection, and then continues with the end of the newly added line.

Examples

Selection of a retaining wall

Usually, a retaining wall will consist of several parts in the Staged Construction mode because of e.g. soil layers and excavation levels. To quickly select the entire wall, just SHIFT + click on one of the wall parts:

Figure 1. Smart select (right) for a retaining wall

Selection of a tunnel lining

This smart selection is also a convenient tool to select tunnel linings. See e.g. the case of an NATM tunnel (taken from this Tutorial Lesson) in which we have this geometry:

Figure 2. Geometry of an NATM tunnel

The geometry shows a top heading consisting of 4 segments, a separation with 2 segments and the bottom consisting of 6 segments.

When in staged construction mode, we can use this smart selection tool (SHIFT+click) to quickly select a part of the tunnel lining in order to activate it:

Figure 3. Smart selection of an NATM tunnel lining: top, separation and bottom

The reason not all tunnel lining lines can be selected at once using this smart selection tool is that at the intersection of the “separation” with the outer tunnel lining, a line has two connected lines with plates. Here the smart selection will stop adding lines to the current selection.

Tips

• When the smart selection includes too many lines, these can easily be removed by using CTRL+click to remove items from the selection. Subsequently, with CTRL+click you can also add single lines to the selection.
• To select multiple plates with a certain (rectangular) area, the multi-select tool could be more convenient. In that case, activate the Select multiple objects tool from the side toolbar, and then from the dropdown menu, hover over Lines, and then click Select plates. Now by drawing a rectangle over the geometry, all lines with plates in that rectangle are selected.