placing mates in context

rune_thorsen229

Is it bad practice to place mates in-context that depends on the ghosted part? 
Will it create a circular reference or does it suffice to avoid updating?

konstantin_shiriazdanov

As I remember mate connectors do not snap to in-context geometry, which is honestly not as good.

rune_thorsen229

I  discovered that they do, hence the question 

john_mcclary

Depends on what you are trying to accomplish..

One situation I can think of would be to offset off some unusual geometry that would be easier to locate with sketches or custom feature scripts to triangulate a point inside an assembly of parts. Rather than calculating and manually entering offsets in an assembly mate, or a pair of assembly mates each update. Like from the center of mass of a large machine. (although even that isn't difficult to update with a single mate, but you get what I'm laying down right 😉)

Otherwise, it won't do any harm or damage to your model. In-context is just easy to miss when updating. especially when other people are involved. It is best to keep in-context to a minimum, just for the sake of sanity.

rune_thorsen229

john_mcclary  I try to accomplish a design flow where the design philosophy is to make some 3D printed assistive devices for people with physical challenges. This could for example be an orthosis or maybe a splint for a finger. Ideally the designs should be such that even a non expert user could follow an 'instructable' and in a few steps to go in and change the geometry.  Say putting in some diameter, length and then 3D print the result. 
Furthermore a student/physiotherapist or user should be able to study the basics of design and go in and improve the model (and unfortunately Onshape keeps failing on that point but currently I cant find a better alternative).
Therefore I strive to develop a workflow that allow us to guide new designers (and non) to develop parametric solutions. I've studied lots of beautiful solutions proposed  by designers, usually they don't scale well or engineers who make perfect parametric solutions but they often involves incomprehensible steps. 

Ideally it's should be so easy that you only have one tab to open and a few measures to insert - go to another tab see the functional model - 3 tab allows you to export a slicing ready model.