Moving multiple features at once

piotr_paczyński

I'm working in Part Studio with lots of parts. I like to keep my feature list clean and quite frequently rearrange the order of features as my design evolves. Features naturally tend to form tightly related groups. I often find a need to move several (say 10) consecutive features into new position in feature list (say 20 positions up).

I select all 10 features and try to drag-and-drop them to a new position, but only the feature I started dragging gets moved. Is there any way to move multiple features quickly?

Piotr

TimRice

I agree, I often have to rearrange several features at once and doing so one by one is quite tedious. There is already an improvement request for rearranging several featurelist items at once so it is certainly on our radar!

3dcad

I agree that moving multiple features would be handy at some cases.

But not having this teaches us to reuse sketches in history. For example @chrisjh777 case, you should go and edit the sketch in history, add point there and create hole before your existing mirror feature in first place. This way feature list stays shorter and editing is easy as many things grow from single skecth.

andrew_troup

Hmm .. even Solidworks didn't support this, although I often wished it would.

It's a big ask, I think, in terms of how complicated it would be to implement, particularly given the multi-part nature of an Onshape part studio, with interdependencies which can be deeply multidirectional and interwoven. 

Something which (it seems to me) might answer your need while being achievable would be something along these lines:

A carefully thought-out set of controls to let the user reorganise the LOOK of the tree to suit various purposes, without actually changing the order in which the features happened in the virtual world.

piotr_paczyński

Hmm, I don't think it's difficult to implement at all. I can already do it easily just be doing 10 consecutive drag-and-drop reordering operations and that works perfectly fine. It's just a little laborious - I have to be careful not to change the order within the "group" I'm moving and if the target slot is far away, then for each drag-and-drop I need to do some scrolling. So all I need is that these 10 (or so) manual steps are automated. Is that really a big ask?

Of course I'm talking about a situation where I know that the features I'm moving do not depend on features I move them past. But even if that is not the case, Onshape is pretty good already at allowing me to fix resulting error after the move.

Regarding you suggestion of reorganizing just the LOOK of the tree - it's not something I'm after. In my case the reason of moving the features around is to make my design intent clear - i.e. "this set of features (no longer) depends on previous ones" etc.

brucebartlett

I quite often find I want to order the parts list. To do this you have to drag features around in the the feature tree, a multiple select maybe be helpful but only occasionally. I think it would also be neat to be able to drag order the parts and have the features follow if the parametric construction allows for this, in reality however you would most likely run into parametric issues on more than half your parts. 

kevin_quigley

Parent. Child. 

Provided the features dont get moved above their parent all is well. Otherwise it fails. But therein lies the power and the problem with history. Solve that and you rewrite the industry.

brucebartlett

Thanks @"Kevin Quigley" , thats what I meant. Parent- Child

michaelprichard

I'd love to re-awaken this thread as it's really hurting my productivity. I've got a complex assembly with a Part Studio 455 features long; rebuilding this after rolling back to one of the earlier features takes between 1-3 minutes for each edit, so I have to carefully decide how I batch my edits to minimize the rebuilds, usually rolling back to the last features I need to change so that only a fraction of the features need to rebuild between updates. My issue is that around 40% of the way through my feature tree I've got a series of mirror operations; before those, I'm working on a quadrant of a rectangular assembly, and all features which are symmetrically duplicated in all 4 quadrants are located here. All features after the mirrors occur only once. I've got a somewhat complex group of features which I'd only originally intended to use once in one of the quadrants; hence they were toward the end of the feature tree, well after the mirror ops. Well, now I need those features in all quadrants of the assembly and need to drag them before the mirrors. Because I can only grab one feature at a time, it can take 2-3 minutes times the number of features to accomplish this change, or, in my case, well over 15-20 minutes where in NX I'd be done in 10 sec. It always annoyed me in SW that one could only move a single feature at a time, but perhaps I was spoiled by NX which has always allowed this. I agree with the original poster that this is really a trivial problem since all of the errors that might be generated can be handled as they are now, just batched together. Incidentally, I'm writing this entire comment in the gaps between feature rebuilds as I drag one feature at a time 250 features earlier in the tree....

chrisjh777

I also would like to be able to move multiple selected features upwards in the "feature tree".  Right now you can move only one feature at a time.

This is a typical scenario:

1.  I create a feature and mirror it.

2.  Much later in the design effort, I add a sketch point on the feature to locate a simple hole.

3.  I add the hole feature to the point. So I now have a sketch and associated hole.

4.  The hole does not appear in the earlier mirror.

5.  Eureka!! I have to move the point sketch and associated hole to before the mirror feature, so the logical thing to do is control select the sketch and hole and drag to just before the mirror.  Only the last selected feature or sketch is dragged.  So I have to repeat the drag for the feature or sketch that did not come along.  Works but not efficient and costs time.

chrisjh777

Just had another thought.  

Wouldn't it be great if all you had to do was drag and drop a feature and the associated sketch came along automatically!!

TimRice

I agree, I often have to rearrange several features at once and doing so one by one is quite tedious. There is already an improvement request for rearranging several featurelist items at once so it is certainly on our radar!

3dcad

I agree that moving multiple features would be handy at some cases.

But not having this teaches us to reuse sketches in history. For example @chrisjh777 case, you should go and edit the sketch in history, add point there and create hole before your existing mirror feature in first place. This way feature list stays shorter and editing is easy as many things grow from single skecth.