Part names = Part numbers ?

JoshBarnett

Can we link part names to part numbers?

Part names seem like they'd often be a redundant property when you have a part number and description

What do others do here with naming conventions?

Cheers
Josh

john_mcclary

I don't have a true "tutorial" of what I do.

But I did record a screen capture of the typical workflow.
Onshape has a few additional features that make this a little easier (BOM templates for example)

maybe when I find some free time (not very much lately) then I'll make a guide on setting up templates and creating the spreadsheet and filling in the BOM

here is a silent video showing the workflow I mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12idFe3l_tU

S1mon

In Solidworks PDM at my last company, we left the part number as a property/variable which was easily searchable. The part name was very similar to the drawing description. Despite the idea that everything will live in PDM or Onshape or whatever PLM system, the real world ends up with a lot of file transfers and challenges. So we kept the part names human readable and safe for lowest common denominator file systems (no "special" characters beyond dash and underscore). The file names were used whenever we exported revisions for sharing ("ProjectName-Housing-Lower.sldprt" -> "ProjectName-Housing-Lower_Rev01.step").

Part Number:
3-01234 

Part Name:
ProjectName-Housing-Lower.sldprt

Drawing Description:
HOUSING, LOWER, PROJECT NAME

In retrospect, I would add the part number to the human readable name (the part name), at least for the export. So maybe "ProjectName-Housing-Lower_3-01234_Rev01.step". There's something to be said for names that sort intelligently if they're dumped into a random file system. One could argue that the part number should be first, but I prefer non-significant part numbers, so there's not much use in sorting by the part number first.

In Onshape things are very different. We also have to consider how to name documents and part studios. For me, since they can contain many parts/assemblies/drawings they need to be human readable, but I haven't really figured out a system that makes sense to me yet.

tim_hess427

In general, I try to keep one one part (or just a few closely related parts) per document. Also, we use the same PN for a part and it's accompanying drawing. So, my metadata looks like:

Document Name: "Part Number" - "Human readable description"
Part Studio Name: "Part Number" - "Human readable description"

Part Name: "Part Number" - "Human readable description"
Part Description: "Human readable description"
Part Number: "Part Number"

Drawing Name: "Part Number" - "Human readable description"
Drawing Description: "Human readable description"
Drawing Part Number: "Part Number"

It's all very redundant, but keeping the part number and human readable description together wherever possible really helps avoid confusion in search results and when you start adding things to assemblies. I think my method is probably less necessary now that there have been some improvements to how search results are displayed, but it still makes it nice to quickly see which part is in which document. 

john_mcclary

I do the exact same thing. 

It makes searching and sorting the assembly tree much better. 

I just fill in the description in the Metadata, then when the project is ready for detail and release, i'll copy the BOM into a spreadsheet and use spreadsheet tools to populate the redundancy. 

Then paste the results back into Onshape and watch the parts and assmeblies rename themselves in the tree and tabs.. Pretty cool to beable to rename/remember the entire project in a couple minutes. The same task takes most or a day in SW

emagdalenaC2i

S1mon said:

In retrospect, I would add the part number to the human readable name (the part name), at least for the export. 

You can do that in Onshape if you set an exportation rule and prefix it with the Part number.

tim_hess427 said:

In general, I try to keep one part (or just a few closely related parts) per document.

Why? One of the best things about working with Onshape is the ability to design multiple components together in a single Part Studio, without the need to create external references. And also the ability to add several related parts in the same document, with their Parts Studios, Assemblies and Drawings.

In general, the method I like is to use simple names for the parts. When designing a project I can define 5 parts named "Bracket". I'm not worried about using the same name, at least in the initial design process.

Once the initial design is done (Parts, and assemblies are created and the design solution is set and clear), then I set all the names, part numbers and properties and then I create the drawings.

I can search for a "Bracket" in the documents page and check if there are a similar part already design, and reuse it or copy to other project.


But...

When creating a configured Part Studio, things can get quite complicated. Because it is necessary to define a specific description and part number to each configured component (and even a specific part name).

For these cases, I have created a custom FeatureScript to handle all these properties. The target of this FeatureScript is to set automatic and parametric properties to each configured part:

https://youtu.be/te1eGEg8aoc 

This FeatureScript is included in the "Onshape C2i Business Program" that we provide to all of our Onshape customers.

emagdalenaC2i

An example of that configured Part Studios and assemblies with this FeatureScript:

tim_hess427

@emagdalenaC2i - To answer your question about keeping things separate - There are situations where I've got multiple parts designed together in the same studio, like overmolded parts, or two parts of the same electronics enclosure.  However, we also have a lot of parts that could be used in multiple products or multiple variations/iterations of a product. So, it's easier to find things if they can stand on their own and not be kept inside a product specific document, or something like that. 

It also keeps my history trees cleaner. If I want to review the history for a single part, I don't want to sort through changes to a bunch of other parts. 

JoshBarnett

Thanks for the comments on this everyone, sorry had not replied sooner. Good to get an idea what others do with part names/numbers.

@john_mcclary sounds great, are there any tutorials of this BOM copy and paste you would recommend? I'm still learning

Really like the FS @emagdalenaC2i


I like the idea of designing common parts without feature dependency (like @tim_hess427 mentioned) and then instanciate the part configurations in an assembly based on the assembly config variables. 

In trying to get familiar with onshape I found myself modelling many parts within the same part studio to account for dependencies... but found this is not very robust as editing upstream features can kill your downstream parts and re-modelling time offsets the time saved with the part studio. I'd used feature folders to seperate between parts but I feel like this may not be a well scalable or supportable method with larger or more complicated things

chandra_harsha

@JoshBarnett I generally don't try to go beyond 35 features in a given part-studio tree. This becomes like 40+ during design process, when you keep working with assembly. So you can say thats how limit myself. Even if part is related to parts in this part-studio, I make it in new part-studio, and relate them using in-context designs. This is how I work to keep balance between clearer part-studio trees (thus easily editable and searchable) & more related parts in part-studios.

Also, when you increase features in part-studio, its loading time increases considerably. You can check this performance tab (top left) for every Onshape design tab. You can also use this parameter to gauge how many features you want to keep adding in a certain part-studio.     

john_mcclary

I don't have a true "tutorial" of what I do.

But I did record a screen capture of the typical workflow.
Onshape has a few additional features that make this a little easier (BOM templates for example)

maybe when I find some free time (not very much lately) then I'll make a guide on setting up templates and creating the spreadsheet and filling in the BOM

here is a silent video showing the workflow I mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12idFe3l_tU

JoshBarnett

Thanks for that @john_mcclary