Improvements to Onshape - March 31st, 2020

Roy_Mutalik

With the current situation, we hope you all are staying safe and healthy. Times may be unpredictable, but we remain focused on bringing new improvements to our users.

Let's take a look at some of the improvements in this latest release of Onshape.

CAD IMPROVEMENTS

ISOLATE IN PART STUDIOS

You can now use the "Isolate" feature in Part studios!

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/imnprhjsqe

BOM CROSS-HIGHLIGHT IMPROVEMENTS

You'll see improved cross-highlight capabilities in a bill of materials when selecting a part from the Instance list, or the modeling space. 

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/sp81ftsjq4

The BOM will even automatically scroll if the selected part is listed lower down (or higher up) in the BOM than you have displayed on the screen.

DRAWING VIEWS: PART STUDIO FILTER

With a new filter, it is now less likely that you accidentally create a drawing view of a Part Studio, when in most cases the intention is to create a view of the part.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/mi8qw8ujnx

SWITCH ANGLE OF PROJECTION ON DRAWING

A new option has been introduced allowing you to quickly switch between First and Third angle projection on an existing drawing you've created. It is available in the Drawing properties, under the Views tab.

This option should be set properly when creating your drawing templates, and all views created will be of the appropriate projection. However, if it is changed after drawing creation, all projected views will automatically update based on the selection, including their names in the Sheets flyout.

PROFESSIONAL IMPROVEMENTS

OPTIONS WHEN REMOVING USERS FROM A COMPANY

When removing a user from a Company, you will now be presented with clear options allowing you to quickly revoke the user's access to all data within your organization. You can select to automatically remove them from any company-owned teams (and thereby revoke their access to any documents shared with those teams) as well as remove them from direct-shares of any documents or folders owned by the company.

RELEASE MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENTS

CREATE RELEASE CANDIDATE FROM VERSION IN DOCUMENT

You can now create a Release candidate directly from an existing version in your current document.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/oilftw0p56

LEARNING CENTER IMPROVEMENTS

ADVANCED PART DESIGN SELF-PACED COURSE

A new course, Advanced Part Design, has been added to the Onshape Learning Center to help you learn advanced features such as variables and Mate connectors in part design, advanced sketching techniques, modeling with complex solid loft and sweep features, and tooling part workflows. This course is available to Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Educational subscriptions.

EXPLODED VIEWS TECHNICAL BRIEFING

A new Technical Briefing is now available, discussing tips and tricks when working with Exploded views.

Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. For a detailed list of all the changes in this update, please see the changelog.

Remember: The updates listed here are now live for all users when creating new Documents and over the next few days these features will also be available in Documents created before the date of this update.

emagdalenaC2i

Great 
+1 for the Part Studio filter in the drawings view dialog

Cache_River_Mill

Thank you Onshape team!

HuguesLessardWRI

Nothing too fancy, but everything here will be very helpful. Thanks!
My favorite is the ability to isolate in PS

Sujan_Patel

really someone requested this....

SWITCH ANGLE OF PROJECTION ON DRAWING....

 The simple answer is to create proper templates. What a waste of resources by implementing this....I am clueless. Is this example of good customer service by implementing such features or bad customer service by ignoring other critical features.

EvanReese

the BoM cross-reference behavior before this release always got to me and seeing that update is a huge relief to me. It makes the BoM a lot more useful. Thanks!

bruce_williams

Thanks! nice set of improvements.  

This new course is excellent - Kudos to @KatieHuffman and team!

ADVANCED PART DESIGN SELF-PACED COURSE

brucebartlett

Evan_Reese said:

the BoM cross-reference behavior before this release always got to me and seeing that update is a huge relief to me. It makes the BoM a lot more useful. Thanks!

Yes, this will make it much more usable, I've always thought it should cross-reference both ways. The BOM table in the assemblies is one of the best features in Onshape which makes so much better than other CAD packages, I love it but hasn't really had any upgrades since the initial release. Glad to see they working on it.  Hopefully, we'll see something done to make the column formatting more usable. 

Sujan_Patel

Really someone requested this....

SWITCH ANGLE OF PROJECTION ON DRAWING....

 The simple answer is to create and use proper templates when you begin drawings. What a waste of resources by implementing such feature.

Is this example of a good customer service or poor customer service by ignoring implementation of other critical feature?

brucebartlett

Thanks for the updates, always very welcome and so awesome we don't have to install anything, just log in as normal and get the latest version. 

Isolate looks good, but I have to admit I was really hoping it would highlight which features on the tree were used to make the part or even truncate the tree down the relevant features. 

john_mcclary

Sujan_Patel said:

really someone requested this....

SWITCH ANGLE OF PROJECTION ON DRAWING....

 The simple answer is to create proper templates. What a waste of resources by implementing this....I am clueless. Is this example of good customer service by implementing such features or bad customer service by ignoring other critical features.

It is GREAT customer service, they will sprinkle a little "not-so-critical" stuff in-between some other important updates.
It is far better than just ignoring the little guy.

This happened to me at least 3 times at my current job.
Where our customer changed their drawing standards from 3rd to 1st angle, then we had to go through the 100s of drawing sheets and fix everything.
Just to have them buy another (almost) duplicate system the very next year and abandoned the 1st angle projection. So we had to update the drawings back to 3rd  projection during the next release (because naturally the original draft was so far out of date at that point of the revisions to be worth reusing).

in summary, Don't hate on a feature just because YOU won't use it.
I'm glad Onshape now has this option. It is pretty basic really, and doesn't add bloat.

(I voted you down by the way, because their customer service will bend over backwards and work past midnight to fix your documents, and you bash them for giving a simple quality of life improvement...congrats that is the 2nd downvote i gave on these forums) 

Sujan_Patel

Sujan_Patel said:

Really someone requested this....

SWITCH ANGLE OF PROJECTION ON DRAWING....

 The simple answer is to create and use proper templates when you begin drawings. What a waste of resources by implementing such feature.

Is this example of a good customer service or poor customer service by ignoring implementation of other critical feature?

Two "Vote Down"....11 users are online and 9 are Onshape support engineers.   

john_mcclary

All good stuff here by the way.
Been waiting and hoping for the insert part studio filter since day 1. This will be a great quality of life improvement when trying to migrate people over here.

Sujan_Patel

john_mcclary said:

Sujan_Patel said:

really someone requested this....

SWITCH ANGLE OF PROJECTION ON DRAWING....

 The simple answer is to create proper templates. What a waste of resources by implementing this....I am clueless. Is this example of good customer service by implementing such features or bad customer service by ignoring other critical features.

It is GREAT customer service, they will sprinkle a little "not-so-critical" stuff in-between some other important updates.
It is far better than just ignoring the little guy.

This happened to me at least 3 times at my current job.
Where our customer changed their drawing standards from 3rd to 1st angle, then we had to go through the 100s of drawing sheets and fix everything.
Just to have them buy another (almost) duplicate system the very next year and abandoned the 1st angle projection. So we had to update the drawings back to 3rd  projection during the next release (because naturally the original draft was so far out of date at that point of the revisions to be worth reusing).

in summary, Don't hate on a feature just because YOU won't use it.
I'm glad Onshape now has this option. It is pretty basic really, and doesn't add bloat.

(I voted you down by the way, because their customer service will bend over backwards and work past midnight to fix your documents, and you bash them for giving a simple quality of life improvement...congrats that is the 2nd downvote i gave on these forums) 

A customer changes standard "3" times and your company updated 100s drawings.  And Onshape bought that story and they work past midnight to fix document.

brucebartlett

Sujan_Patel said:

Sujan_Patel said:

Really someone requested this....

SWITCH ANGLE OF PROJECTION ON DRAWING....

 The simple answer is to create and use proper templates when you begin drawings. What a waste of resources by implementing such feature.

Is this example of a good customer service or poor customer service by ignoring implementation of other critical feature?

Two "Vote Down"....11 users are online and 9 are Onshape support engineers.   

Hey, Sorry but I voted you down too and I am not an Onshape engineer. I voted down because I can absolutely see the benefit of this feature, it could be a huge time saver if I have to change a set of drawings from one standard to another and I am not sure it would have been a be deal to implement. 

Mike_Volpe

Support Team, first of all thank you so much for your continued dedicated efforts to improve Onshape functionality, especially in this stressful and trying time we are living in right now. 
I do not mean to sound ungrateful, etc., but I have to ask...why are you more concerned with creating a dropdown menu for switching between First and Third Angle Projection in a drawing, when there are more significant improvements that can be done (improvements i've even submitted quite a while ago)? 
Such as:
 - retaining Parent-Child alignment between views when utilizing the 'Break View' command
 - allowing subsequent Section Views to be created from a previous Section View
 - adding View labels (i.e. A-A) and view direction arrow lines to Auxiliary projection views
 - allowing for tolerance edits to be made to a Chamfer callout or a Hole callout

These are a few good examples of much more significant changes you could be working on to improve your product, things i'm sure many other users would appreciate. I'm just asking for re-evaluation of your priorities.
(If I wanted to create my drawing in First Angle projection, I can simply just slide the projected child view to the other side of the page, it's not a big deal)

Thank you again

Sujan_Patel

Title block has projection angle and year of ASME standard.  When standards change, old drawings are not updated to new standards unless until there is a compelling reason. If a company changes standard left and right, then the company has serious fundamental problems. And if they change angle of projection then it has some really really SERIOUS problem and it impacts Onshape and us.

Sujan_Patel

brucebartlett said:

Sujan_Patel said:

Sujan_Patel said:

Really someone requested this....

SWITCH ANGLE OF PROJECTION ON DRAWING....

 The simple answer is to create and use proper templates when you begin drawings. What a waste of resources by implementing such feature.

Is this example of a good customer service or poor customer service by ignoring implementation of other critical feature?

Two "Vote Down"....11 users are online and 9 are Onshape support engineers.   

Hey, Sorry but I voted you down too and I am not an Onshape engineer. I voted down because I can absolutely see the benefit of this feature, it could be a huge time saver if I have to change a set of drawings from one standard to another and I am not sure it would have been a be deal to implement. 

Title block has projection angle and year of ASME standard.  When standards change, old drawings are not updated to new standards unless until there is a compelling reason. If a company changes standard left and right, then the company has serious fundamental problems. And if they change angle of projection then it has some really really SERIOUS problem and it impacts Onshape and us.

sebastian_glanzner

I like to see in the change log that this update provided a lot of fixes! Keep up the good work and stay safe and healthy too! 

brucebartlett

Sujan_Patel said:

brucebartlett said:

Sujan_Patel said:

Sujan_Patel said:

Really someone requested this....

SWITCH ANGLE OF PROJECTION ON DRAWING....

 The simple answer is to create and use proper templates when you begin drawings. What a waste of resources by implementing such feature.

Is this example of a good customer service or poor customer service by ignoring implementation of other critical feature?

Two "Vote Down"....11 users are online and 9 are Onshape support engineers.   

Hey, Sorry but I voted you down too and I am not an Onshape engineer. I voted down because I can absolutely see the benefit of this feature, it could be a huge time saver if I have to change a set of drawings from one standard to another and I am not sure it would have been a be deal to implement. 

Title block has projection angle and year of ASME standard.  When standards change, old drawings are not updated to new standards unless until there is a compelling reason. If a company changes standard left and right, then the company has serious fundamental problems. And if they change angle of projection then it has some really really SERIOUS problem and it impacts Onshape and us.

Good point. I'd have to look at the workflows, I am a bit fuzz on how this all works now and this area has been updated a fair bit over the last few years but as you say if set up correctly upfront it should never be an issue but I was thinking of a scenario where it may be useful for projects where title blocks have to be changed as well as drawing standards and rather than redrawing everything, drawings could be branched and moved to a new doc then redone with another company's standard and title block but all drawing link back to the original parts/assemblies, this may or may not have already been possible. 

MBartlett21

brucebartlett said:

[...]

Good point. I'd have to look at the workflows, I am a bit fuzz on how this all works now and this area has been updated a fair bit over the last few years but as you say if set up correctly upfront it should never be an issue but I was thinking of a scenario where it may be useful for projects where title blocks have to be changed as well as drawing standards and rather than redrawing everything, drawings could be branched and moved to a new doc then redone with another company's standard and title block but all drawing link back to the original parts/assemblies, this may or may not have already been possible.

This would also be useful if a template is used that has the wrong angle of projection

john_mcclary

Sujan_Patel said: Title block has projection angle and year of ASME standard.  When standards change, old drawings are not updated to new standards unless until there is a compelling reason. If a company changes standard left and right, then the company has serious fundamental problems. And if they change angle of projection then it has some really really SERIOUS problem and it impacts Onshape and us

I would agree, but customers are customers...


-----------------------------------------------------

Sujan_Patel said:

A customer changes standard "3" times and your company updated 100s drawings.  And Onshape bought that story and they work past midnight to fix document.

No, they did it anyways for an even more minor issue, because that's how they are...
Here is one example of a time I caught lou working past midnight, too bad he didn't see my message until the next day...
But it was solved when I went back to work in the morning...




This is my last post on this topic, just give credit where credit is due... these people work hard to deliver a product that they care about.

東_鈺

Hope you can input chinese on the drawing

Song_Yikun

STAY SAFE. BE KIND

romeograham

Hey! Isolate in Part Studio works very nicely - it's easy to select elements only of the parts that are showing - which is what isolate really should do!

(I like this because it visually looks like editing In Context, but selections are very hard to get right when working In Context)....this....just works.

Nice updates folks!
Romeo 

Ivan_Deetlefs

Some high value improvements here, especially BOM CROSS-HIGHLIGHT IMPROVEMENTS. The period improvements without the need for a software update makes Onshape a pleasure to work with.

fnxf_scewo

I really like the isolate in the Part Studio- that will be very helpful. Also thank you for making it possible to create a revision from a version- not a feature that I thought I would need, but now that I have it, I am 100% sure that I will use it! Thank you so much for making Onshape better!

Mike_Volpe

john mcclary, i've been trying to request drawing feature improvements for a long time, things much more significant than 1st Angle projection. I feel like i'm being ignored. I'd like to list some examples but everytime i try to post, it doesn't get published here. I think my content is being selectively disapproved. We should be able to give constructive criticism, not just ego stroking.

Piotr_Smektała_VB

Two way BOM cross-reference!
That fulfills request: https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/12972/bom-two-or-one-and-a-half-way-interaction-with-parts-in-assembly-studio
Thank you Guys!

tim_hess427

I'm looking forward to using the "revision from version" feature. There have definitely been times where I was looking for that exact thing. 

One thing that has bugged me, is checking the history of a document before release and seeing several dozen "hide/unhide" or workspace update type changes that don't affect geometry, making me hunt around to verify that the model geometry hasn't changed before a release. Now, I know I can create versions I'm happy with and just go back to release those as appropriate. 

JAN_R

Thanks, Onshape, for all your hard work.  I always look forward to your updates and I can only imagine how many resources have gone into supporting those working from home through this pandemic over the past weeks - and you still managed to get an update out.  Thanks a lot.  Your customer support is fantastic.