How do you manage your library components?

Phil_Dyze

I'd like to know how you guys work for your business standard components.

For now, I'm working as Onshape Document as category, where all the components are imported in different part studios.

For example:
Onshape Document: Connectors


Bearings:


The advantage is that it's very easy to maintain and ensure each connector has the same design baseline (configuration, mate connector, etc)
It's also easy to find the connector document and navigate through it.

The disadvantage is that each time I add or modify a document, a new version is created. Using many different connectors from this document result is many "out of date" notifications...

How do you guys class your standard library?

bradley_sauln

It's recommended to do this as one part per document. We are traditionally conditioned to think in terms of a folder/file structure. That is not the case with Onshape. You should trust and lean more on the searching capabilities. 

Here is our documentation on library creation: https://learn.onshape.com/learn/article/best-practices-for-managing-custom-libraries

Here is another forum conversation that talks through this a little bit from a searching standpoint: https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/60682

I'm more than happy to go more in-depth with you on any questions you may have.

john_mcclary

I used to do it the same way you do here. After a while the out of date notifications started to really get annoying. 

I later separated out everything into it's own document and Created a library folder to keep everything in one place. 

If you follow @billy2
You will see he created a custom property called lib
Then your whole company will be able to search for lib parts by simply looking at that property. 

Phil_Dyze

bradley_sauln said:

It's recommended to do this as one part per document. We are traditionally conditioned to think in terms of a folder/file structure. That is not the case with Onshape. You should trust and lean more on the searching capabilities. 

Here is our documentation on library creation: https://learn.onshape.com/learn/article/best-practices-for-managing-custom-libraries

Here is another forum conversation that talks through this a little bit from a searching standpoint: https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/60682

I'm more than happy to go more in-depth with you on any questions you may have.

Thanks! I'll definitely take a deeper look at this!

romeograham

@Phil_Dyze
Just a quick note on version management if you have many library parts in one Document. If you use Versions, you'll run into the issue of every part in the document becoming out-of-date everywhere it's used (the problem you and @john_mcclary mentioned.

However, if you release each part individually (using Onshape's Release Management), you can keep all your parts in one document - and they won't end up being out-of-date anywhere, unless you release a new Revision of the part.  The downside, is your Version & History tree will have a Revision for every part.

I think the "one part per document" guidance is best here, but thought I'd mention this too!

john_mcclary

Oh that's kida nice. I still haven't messed with revision management yet. 

romeograham

It works really really well. There are some peculiarities, but it does a great job of keeping track of Part Numbers, and Revisions (as it should!). This is a case where it can clean up those out-of-date notifications. - Which, like any Notifications anywhere (ahem, my phone) need to be kept to a manageable level, or they become noise and get ignored.

I want the little blue notifications (for part or FS updates) to be important enough that I act on them when I see them.