Prescribed condition managers are dialog boxes that you use to organize and manipulate the prescribed conditions associated with a given model. Each kind of prescribed condition that you can define in the Load module has a separate manager. You access the managers by selecting Manager from the appropriate menus on the main menu bar. The Load module provides the following managers:

Prescribed condition managers contain alphabetical lists of all the prescribed conditions of a certain type that you have created. For example, the Load Manager shown in Figure 16–1 contains a list of loads.

The Create, Edit, Copy, Rename, and Delete buttons in the managers allow you to create new prescribed conditions or to edit, copy, rename, and delete existing ones. You can also initiate the create, edit, copy, rename, and delete procedures by using the Load, BC, and Predefined Field menus in the main menu bar. After you select a management operation from the main menu bar, the procedure is exactly the same as if you had clicked the corresponding button inside the manager dialog box.

The prescribed condition managers are step-dependent managers, which means that they contain additional information concerning the history of each load, boundary condition, and predefined field in the model. You can use the icons in the column along the left side of the managers to suppress prescribed conditions or to resume previously suppressed prescribed conditions for an analysis. The suppress and resume procedures are also available from the Load, BC, and Predefined Field menus in the main menu bar. For more information, see “Suppressing and resuming objects,” Section 3.4.3.

The Move Left, Move Right, Activate, and Deactivate buttons allow you to manipulate the stepwise history of prescribed conditions. For more information, see “Modifying the history of a step-dependent object,” Section 3.4.6.

For detailed instructions on creating, editing, and manipulating prescribed conditions, see the following sections: