Performance Limit of a Document?

Michael_Coffee

We've been talking about how to approach organizing our documents and we had a few questions dealing with how well a document would handle having multiple tabs within it. There was a post somewhere where someone talked about the document getting convoluted after so many tabs (something like over a hundred or something). We do want to avoid having just a row of tabs that stretch on to infinity, since that would be an organizational nightmare. In one of our scenarios, we would have a single configured model (think giant assembly of different assemblies and parts) at the beginning of the document and then a folder called Drawings for every drawing using that model. We would organize the drawings into more folders, but eventually, you'd reach the section that only has a handful of drawings (maybe 5 or so, not sure yet ultimately how many there actually will be). Using this approach, would we see a problem with the document if there were over a hundred or more drawings organized inside of these folders?

john_mcclary

I think drawings are pretty light weight, because they only open or update when you click on them. So it shouldn't affect document performance much.

Otherwise you could have a separate document wdth all of yoir drawings instead. But then you need to manage versions 

Roy_Mutalik

Hi Michael,

Generally, it is a good idea to think about breaking up your designs so you don't have "hundreds of tabs" within one document, regardless of what type of data it is (parts, assy, drawings). There are some resources that discuss this in the learning center, please feel free to take a look at these below.

https://learn.onshape.com/courses/best-practices-for-managing-data-in-an-onshape-document

https://learn.onshape.com/learn/article/product-structure-organization-tips

Keep in mind, you can always move tabs between docs at a later date, as described in both articles. These can be used, in conjunction with folders (both in documents and at your "My Onshape" page), to help organize your data.

I hope some of this preliminary information helps!

bradley_sauln

@Michael_Coffee - To put things in perspective, here is a public document of a Mountain bike that is split across about 19 documents. 

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/9daa9008f7565f7f9ff8295a/w/4f08995a9b3b36466601d3f5/e/8165414cbea34f580a5b70a8

When people start to mention 100's of tabs I like to try to relate it to a part in a traditional CAD file. Would you have hundreds of parts in a single CAD file? Not necessarily, you'd probably want to split it up and organize it for both Organization, performance, and reusability purposes.