Bernd,

Currently Concepts Explorer displays only the selected item in the feature tree. I've had a few folks ask for an option to display all visible objects with filters to control what gets displayed. Is this along the lines you are thinking?

Tim,

I could imagine just adding one more tab to the existing Explorer would do it, which would look like:

Features - Objects - Layers - Symbols

The new 'Objects' tab should contain a list (similar to the current layer list), which shows each object in the file. Similar to the layer options, you could add the option to show/hide and lock/unlock objects, and also link objects hierarchically to other objects (like you do with sublayers) or organizational null objects (parent objects).

This feature can be found e.g. in FormZ, IronCad (see screenshots below) and many other applications. When importing CAD files e.g. from Pro/E, this kind of hierarchical structure is already present in assemblies, each consisting of subassemblies etc. Handling files in this way would definitely simplify many things, and the 'layer' way of doing it is so... AutoCad-like ;-)
The disadvantage of the layer method is simply: I don't see what it contains, until I isolate the layer. If I had a list of objects, linked to parents, I can easily identify/select/hide/show anything that's in my file. And since most assemblies contain structural information (names, groups), it would be more than useful to display this information accordingly.

One more advantage: this kind of grouping is supported by STEP, Pro/E (*.asm*), VRML, FACT, 3DS and other formats and could be transferred between applications. AFAIK the next ACIS version will also support this.

Bernd