what is Create Datum?

[MechatroPro]

what is Create Datum? documentation says: "create geometry with the History mode deactivated. In this case, when you create an element, there are no links to the other entities that were used to create that element."
is history free modeling like spaceclaim and such? i mean it enables you to delete the parent without deleting the child?
how it is used?

 

[Azrael]

There are many areas to use this feature, the most frequent one for me is when I copy reference data and work on it to suite my needs, this is when don't want to create a link to another part

 

[tuzoenduro]

Yeps, bluntly said it permits you to do away with the parent without having to loose the child. In fact it lets you isolate what you are doing so it will not have a parent association.
Sort of a "dumb" feature that will not change if the environment does...

 

[jackk]

I don't think using CATIA with the Create Datum feature active is a very smart thing to do. It makes the geometry almost impossible to edit later, plus you give us the relationships that make V5 so much better than previous versions.

 

[tuzoenduro]

Well, all in all it does away with CATIA's "smart" features, which let you keep the tree of how everything was created. It depends on how you are working but sometimes it does pay to have some stuff as datums. When you copy stuff around it's sometimes practical to be able to copy whatever served to make it in the first place (this without going into powercopies, etc, etc).