Some process groups use material stock. The material that is used by such process groups has some form or structure even before the manufacturing process begins. For the sheet metal process group, for example, the material takes the form of a metal sheet; for plastic molding, in contrast, the material takes the form of an unstructured volume or mass of plastic pellets.

For process groups that use material stock, the cost model data specifies a list of available stocks for each type of material (see Working with Cost Model Data and Metadata). For a particular part, the end user can explicitly specify the stock to use; alternatively, the end user can let aPriori select the stock. For cases in which the end user has elected to let aPriori select the material stock, you can supply a material stock selection module to narrow down the available stocks to those that are feasible or desirable for the current part.

For example, for sheet metal parts, a stock selection module can check the geometry of the part, and eliminate stocks whose dimensions are exceeded by the blank dimensions.

When you navigate to the CSL modules for a node (see Navigating from the Template Graph to the Data for a Given Node), if the node has a material stock selection module, the module’s Type Name field is set materialStockSelector and the label materialStockSelector appears next to the folder icon.

This section includes the following subsections: