Welcome to the Onshape forum! Ask questions and join in the discussions about everything Onshape.

First time visiting? Here are some places to start:

Looking for a certain topic? Check out the categories filter or use Search (upper right).
Need support? Ask a question to our Community Support category.
Please submit support tickets for bugs but you can request improvements in the Product Feedback category.
Be respectful, on topic and if you see a problem, Flag it.

If you would like to contact our Community Manager personally, feel free to send a private message or an email.

Best Of

I think I have broken a context

I have a little assembly with lots of similar parts lined up at certain distances from each other. For production purposes, I wanted to make a lasercut jig, so they could all be easily positioned in place while the glue sets. Easy enough.

I did not want the jigs to be part of my assembly, though. So I designed them in context, but kept them in their own document that resides in a "Fixtures and Jigs" folder which has a shared link (accessible from the laser cuttung workshop), other than the assembly. Assuming the context would be established via the in-context sketch, I later deleted the jigs from the main assembly, because they were not meant to show up in any drawings and BOM anyway. Everything looked fine so far.

After a while, I needed to increase the thickness of some of the lined-up parts and therefore the jigs needed to be updated. I noticed, that after making these changes and creating a new version, my in-context jigs did not follow. I get a little blue dot indicating there's an update, but when I update the context, someting strage happens: I get a message asking me to set primary instance of context …

… but there is no menu item for doing so in the context menu.

If I go to the assembly, there is no trace of the context whatsoever …

… and consequently no item in the instance list and of course no context menu, too. I cannot set primary instance there as well. So I ran into a dead end.

Could it be the context management has just lost it? And if so: Is that a bug or did I do someting wrong? Is it because insertion of in context objects does only work on surfaces and bodies, not on sketches? Would that mean we shouldn't expect context based on just sketches to ever update with design changes? That would make the concept of in-context sketching questionable, then.

For tis time, I'll probably have to make new jigs, but I'd like to avoid such turbulences in the future.

martin_kopplow

Re: How to revert to a previous version?

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/118672#Comment_118672

Yes, it can be done from the list view that shows all the documents. Versions and History, and their related abilities, are available there, without the document being open.

nick_papageorge_dayjob

Re: Part alignment using width mate

Thank you - yes that also works well.

graham_lock

Re: Configurations of released parts

I you set the spring configuration input to "exclude from properties" the configurations will share a single part number to be released.

It's not available for assemblies but I think it should solve your specific use case.

eric_pesty

Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 27th, 2025

I really liked the grid view of the old documents page. I find myself visually scanning the thumbnails to find the right document and that's harder with the change to a linear list with only 6-10 showing at a time instead of 20+.

seth_troisi

Re: External Editor

kevin_o_toole_1 said:

There isn't an easy way of doing this.

Ideally, we want to make the experience editing FeatureScript inside a Feature Studio great. Feature Studios have some nice features that an offline editor would be missing, like autocomplete of all your imported libraries, versioning with your onshape documents, and automatic rebuilding of Part Studios when you commit.

If your favorite editor has specific features that you'd like Onshape Feature Studios to also support, please submit an improvement request!

I don't see an economical path that would make editing FeatureScript inside a Feature Studio "great". I can't imagine an experienced programmer working within the existing editor being anything other than incredibly frustrated. I'm not criticizing the existing effort as a bare-bones tool for adding very simple features, but there's no way you can (or should) compete with an editor that's had decades of person-years put in to addressing the needs of programmers.

Just off the top of my head, the following features are missing:

split editor windows (opening in separate tabs is quite cumbersome)
search/replace over multiple FeatureScript Files
refactoring
code folding
edit key bindings
bookmarking
ability to implement new features inside the editor

These and at least a dozen other features are pretty much expected in even the most basic programmer's editor.

Although syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and other features might be initially missing from an external editor, they'd be relatively easy to implement if we had even a rudimentary file/workspace api to interface with Onshape. FeatureScript has the advantage of being mostly like javascript, so it wouldn't be very hard to tweak existing javascript editors to accommodate FeatureScript. Most importantly, it's a task that the community could tackle - and we currently CAN'T change the built-in editor as far as I'm aware.

dan_bullok

nagy_laszlo

Re: Workspace Protection in practice?

Wow. Ouch. That's super useful information which basically makes the feature too painful to recommend unless you're always making changes and merging back within a shorter time window.

S1mon