Get Internal ID of selection

MBartlett21

I would like to get the internal ID of my selection, so I can tell if a change will break some references or not.

konstantin_shiriazdanov

I can also add that getting entity ID and being able to track its parent/child ID's (for example in patterned geometry) would add much to the value of FS.

MBartlett21

@konstantin_shiriazdanov
I could make a FS that will store an entity ID, but i'd really like Onshape to add it into their UI (i.e. visibly see if it changes in features)

kevin_o_toole_1

transientQueriesToStrings will return a selection's internal id. However I suspect this is not actually what you want. Internal IDs can change without any harm (e.g. any upstream feature will change the internal ids of all downstream features, even if it doesn't effect them), and breaking changes can occur without any id change (e.g. an id used for one face initially could refer to a conceptually totally different face after a change). The way in Onshape of determining which entities are which is not ids. It's queries: both those generated for selections and those manually created in FS. Our generated queries will resolve successfully if they can, and otherwise will turn red in the UI and resolve to nothing inside the feature.

I think I lack a good conceptual model of the request here. A motivating example would help. For instance, what do you want to be the trigger for check? What determines the correct "before" state to compare against? What changes should fail the check, and what changes should pass? What UI are you imagining?

lana

If I understand it correctly, you'd like to be able to trace dependencies of the entity identity and entities downstream whose identities depend on this one. Let's say It is a DAG ( parent-child graph). Some of the nodes are not visible (don't exist) in current state, but could be highlighted if we roll back to the state when they've been alive. The node can carry the operation id so that this is some-what useful for debugging custom features. Is this close?

MBartlett21

@lana
Yes
One use of this would be to tell if a custom feature will break a feature downstream.