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Finding drawings related to parts
brucebartlett
Member, OS Professional, Mentor, User Group Leader Posts: 2,140 PRO
One thing I wish I could do is to open the related part or assembly drawings via an RMB if the drawing exists either in that workspace or another version. At the moment the only way I can see to finding drawings easily is structuring the document with drawings next to the studio or assembly tab. If using the search tool you have to make surer drawing name is in a good format A few times I, have ended up with multiple drawings for the same parts as there is no indication of an existing drawing. I've also found multiple page drawing can cause drawing to be lost too.
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It is easy to go the other way by clicking the "open linked document" from a derive or drawing.
Twitter: @onshapetricks & @babart1977
Equivalently, both parts and drawings have a part number property. Using the same value in this field for all drawings relating to the same part, and searching using the part number field of the advanced search tool with find all the related drawings.
Can you give an example of how you use this approach without causing confusion around the drawing number and part number on the drawing?
We usually do not use a separate drawing number in our system, rather we add additional pages to the one-and-only drawing for a given part number. By filtering the search to "Drawings" or "Parts" we can find one or the other selectively. There are exceptions, of course, and in those cases we add a Drawing No field to the sheet format that references the Name property of the drawing.
To cut down on redundant search results, we set the release state of non-active drawings (in versions or old releases) to "Obsolete" or "Discarded" and select "Released" or "In progress" as search filters when actually trying to find active data.
To speed things up further, I made a google sheet with formulas to pre-enter the search filter criteria into a URL. The sample formula below, assuming you put the part number into cell A2, will create a URL to an Onshape search page that will find all released drawings with that search term in their Part Number property field:
=HYPERLINK(CONCATENATE("https://cad.onshape.com/documents?nodeId=1&resourceType=filter&column=modifiedAt&order=desc&viewMode=0&q=type:drawing partnumber:"",A2,"%22%20state:RELEASED%20foundin:v%20when:all"),A2)
P.S. when all is said and done, we often end up duplicating the same part number into five separate property fields:
Part Studio - Name
Part - Name
Part - Part Number
Drawing - Name
Drawing - Part Number
It is sufficient, however, to ensure that just the Part - Part Number and the Drawing - Part Number properties match.
I opted not to take this workaround.
The drawing isn't really the same PN as a part, if you have multiple parts on a drawing, then what? What happens when you need multiple drawings of the same part?
Also if you use the release process and you want to avoid duplicate PN this is not feasible.
IMO this is the largest gap in OnShape offering right now. I'm trying to tie a few other platforms to OnShape via API and this is one of my roadblocks.
If anyone has a solution for the API (some lookup) that might address this, please let me know.
@brucebartlett any solutions in the past year and 4 months since you first posted this?
I've taken the approach that @BulletEngineering uses - All of my part names, tab names, and part studios have the part number listed for clarity. Our quality system is also very old school so the drawing number and part number are considered the same thing, so I end up releasing all drawings and parts with the same part number and just keep the revisions in sync.
Having an efficient way to link drawing PNs to part PNs would be a critical thing needed for us to start improving our system and workflows, I think. Otherwise, I'm not sure how to keep track of related parts and drawings without some sort of external spreadsheet to track everything.
Currently the "Where used" function can find drawings in a previous version, which is better than nothing but still a little clunky. It would be nice if the parts in the assembly feature tree, or in the parts list of the part studio had an icon that noted if there was a 2D reference to the part (similar to the update, version, and context icons). Being able to right click on the icon and take you to the main working space of the 2D reference drawing would be very desirable.