constraint elipses hides over-constrained or dangling constraints.

brett_sutton

I had a problem with an over-constrained sketch.

Solving the the problem was made difficult by the fact that I couldn't see the problem constraint.

I eventually worked out that when you have a lot of constraints, the list is shorted and you get a '...' to indicate that their are more constraints.

When I clicked the '...' the problem constraint was shown.

This makes it very hard to find problem constraints.

This could be easily solved by 'sorting the constraints' so that problem constraints are displayed first and in this way they would not be hidden when a set of constraints are abbreviated with ellipses.

Brett

julian_leland

+1. Good suggestion.

3axis

I also find it hard to determine which is the problem constraint, especially when many or seemingly all are red. The only way I have found so far is to try to understand which might be the problem and delete it, undoing if not.

I had an issue where I changed the plane for the sketch and transformed the sketch 90 degrees to be vertical instead of flat and most of the constraints went red, it turned out to be that there was one tied to the plane geometry lines (XYZ) when it was in the other plane. It was very hard to find, I pretty much when round them all (20+) deleting and undoing. Ticking show constraints showed some that were not red but there were about 5 times more red ones. Also the constraints were on top of each other with no visual reference to tell me this, I found it out by accident.

I have one at the moment where I have used the 'use' tool to 'import' lines from a sketch on a plane below to have two of the same shape blocks vertically separated and all of the 'use' constraints just went red. I did not know what these type was at first because they are not available to apply from the menu so did not visually match anything. Even having worked that out, I have no idea why they just went red.

I find more than half the time I spend working in onshape is hitting the undo button and re-doing to work out how it works or why it went wrong, the help is very sparse in explanation and I don't have time to sit through hundreds of videos in the hope glimpsing something that may relate to my problem.

It would be good if constraints could be ranked to help find the problem or even better show the root cause. Or perhaps some way of disabling them and re-enabling them, could the software not automatically do this, disable them all and add them back in noting which cause an issue, with multiple runs of this in different orders I wonder if it would be possible to identify the root cause(s)?