Improvements to Onshape - October 25th, 2021

Lindsay_Early

We are releasing our second update for October. This release brings the major improvement of Where Used for Professional users!

CAD IMPROVEMENTS

HOLE FEATURE IMPROVEMENTS

The Hole feature interface hasn't changed, but we've made some changes to improve the user experience. These updates are present in all new, but not existing Hole features.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/kou6lwygjd

PROFESSIONAL IMPROVEMENTS

WHERE USED

Where Used is now in Onshape Professional!

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/us4epbzwar

DRAWING IMPROVEMENTS

OPEN ARROWHEAD STYLE

The Drawing Properties contain a new open arrowhead style in the Annotations, Dimensions, and Views (Section and Detail) options.

INSPECTION ITEMS

This release brings the exciting addition of Inspection Items!

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/m8j4li0y46

GENERAL IMPROVEMENTS

API IMPROVEMENTS

Onshape REST API now supports basic authentication to improve ease-of-use and bring our authentication in line with other cloud software companies.

LEARNING CENTER IMPROVEMENTS

NEW CLASSES

Onshape Enterprise for Light Users

Educate light users within the enterprise to effectively navigate and use Onshape. This course is geared to enterprise light users that may be unfamiliar with CAD and PDM tools. The content in this course helps users who are not designers or engineers navigate Onshape to view parts, assemblies, and drawings. This new self-paced course is available to Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Educational users.

Self-Guided Training Format

The Onshape training team has created all of the live professional-level classes in an on-demand format, that we are calling self-guided. This new format offers another way for professionals to learn the same topics taught in the virtual classroom sessions, on their own schedules. These self-guided courses offer the same course materials and hands-on exercises as the live training sessions, with recorded videos for each topic. There is also a way to reach out to the Onshape training team for any questions you might have!

VIDEO UPDATES

There have been several additional video updates to existing courses in the Onshape Learning Center, including a new video on sketch inferencing in Introduction to Sketching, a new video exploring Assembly folders within the Instance list in Onshape Assemblies, and a few new videos in the Detailed Drawings course explaining hatching, Hole tables, and Revision tables.

Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments on the Onshape Forum. 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 Onshape Documents and over the next few days these features will also be available in Documents created before the date of this update.

SethF

Cool performance improvements in the holes tool and (from the change log) Drawings and Assemblies opening times!

ian_d_gardiner

Where Used! Thank you!! 

Ed_McGuire

The first video on Holes is not loading, at least not on my computer.

lougallo

Ed_McGuire said:

The first video on Holes is not loading, at least not on my computer.

There should be no difference.  Can you see it in a different browser?  The other videos work fine though?

Theo_R

Great improvements!! Way to go!!
Hole features, Where Used (always a good one), Inspection Items!!!
Thank you!!

Inspection Items -  API forthcoming?
https://cad.onshape.com/glassworks/#/Drawing

Logan_5

I tried out the hole feature and I am noticing that it doesn't cut through a fillet if it is on the same plane. 

PeteYodis

@Logan_5 I've created a ticket for you on this.  We'll converse in the support ticket on this case.  

It's certainly possible you are bumping into this:

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

xphilip

Congrats to the whole Onshape team on another stellar release!
Lindsay - the quality of your videos (content, narration, editing etc.) is outstanding - Neil is either very proud, or worried, or both

George_Anderson

I had a minor regression in a FS that allowed selecting points. It appears that points created with opPoint now don't satisfy "ConstructionObject.NO". Is that intentional? I had a query filter with 

(EntityType.VERTEX && BodyType.POINT && ConstructionObject.NO && SketchObject.NO)

which allowed selecting such points, but now I need to leave the ConstructionObject filter out. I'm not sure if I actually needed that filter, just curious why this changed.

George_Anderson

Also did something change about how enums in nested preconditions work? I have a precondition used to factor out common query selection behavior from two features. I'm getting a couple new errors where I nested some logic in the deeper precondition. I can make a separate post, just pinging here, since it may be a regression.

Ed_McGuire

lougallo said:

Ed_McGuire said:

The first video on Holes is not loading, at least not on my computer.

There should be no difference.  Can you see it in a different browser?  The other videos work fine though?

i'v tried both Chrome and Opera.  Both up to date.  It seems like it works for others.  i'm good

ilya_baran

@George_Anderson Please submit a ticket for these.  I'm not aware of intentional changes in the area (and I would at least know about precondition analysis), so it would be good to track this down.

S1mon

It's amazing that things like inspection items are being added. Adding this functionality in Solidworks costs almost 1/2 the price of Onshape.

One thing that was missing in the video was how items with something like "4X" are handled. I would normally have 4 inspection numbers, but I might put ① - ④ instead of ① ② ③ ④, depending on the drawing.

MichaelPascoe

Inspection items! Api looks useful too.

Legit update. Thank you Onshape team!

Hans_Leirvik_1

Where used - finally. Thank you

gerhard_swanepoel

Solid improvements - great!

GuidoNADEC

Great improvements. I like the "where used". Really improves quality.

Pierre_Lin

Great improvements, is exporting inspection items available through an API?

Lindsay_Early

S1mon said:

It's amazing that things like inspection items are being added. Adding this functionality in Solidworks costs almost 1/2 the price of Onshape.

One thing that was missing in the video was how items with something like "4X" are handled. I would normally have 4 inspection numbers, but I might put ① - ④ instead of ① ② ③ ④, depending on the drawing.

Please file a ticket for the improvement. This is just the beginning of our inspection functionality so filing improvements will help us align it with what our customers need.

Josiah_Harthcock

Love this update! Looking forward to where used!

Jake_Rosenfeld

George_Anderson said:

I had a minor regression in a FS that allowed selecting points. It appears that points created with opPoint now don't satisfy "ConstructionObject.NO". Is that intentional? I had a query filter with 

(EntityType.VERTEX && BodyType.POINT && ConstructionObject.NO && SketchObject.NO)

which allowed selecting such points, but now I need to leave the ConstructionObject filter out. I'm not sure if I actually needed that filter, just curious why this changed.

@George_Anderson this change was intentional.  It provides consistency between the origin and the default planes, which are all now considered "Construction Geometry".  Before, only the default planes were "Construction Geometry", and the origin was not, which felt inconsistent to us internally.

If you have a workflow that breaks due to this, please feel free to discuss with support and we can try to find an adequate solution.

bruce_williams

where used and inspection points!!
and 'Upgraded translation services for various formats' from changelog is always welcome.  Thanks Onshape team!!

KC_onshape

Cool new update, but the October updates have led to really poor Onshape performance on my computer after 2 years with no issues.
The options drop down menus when creating features (such as Blind, Up to Face, Through All, etc for extrusions) keep displaying only the first option -- if the little window displays properly at all -- which can only be corrected by completely exiting out of the document and reloading the workspace, sometimes even requiring closing Onshape entirely. Yesterday this happened no less than 10 times in just over an hour of work. Super inconvenient and frustrating. I hope this bug can be identified and fixed soon.

timandrews

KC_onshape said:

Cool new update, but the October updates have led to really poor Onshape performance on my computer after 2 years with no issues.
The options drop down menus when creating features (such as Blind, Up to Face, Through All, etc for extrusions) keep displaying only the first option -- if the little window displays properly at all -- which can only be corrected by completely exiting out of the document and reloading the workspace, sometimes even requiring closing Onshape entirely. Yesterday this happened no less than 10 times in just over an hour of work. Super inconvenient and frustrating. I hope this bug can be identified and fixed soon.

@KC_onshape, which browser are you using? We are currently investigating an issue with Safari 15 that affects drop down menus in the way you are describing. Please try using a different browser such as Chrome or Firefox in the meantime.

S1mon

@Lindsay_Early
My question was how does the tool handle items which are, for example, "4X"? Does it just put one inspection note or can I manually add more, or does it automatically add the right number?

After a little playing with the feature in a drawing, it seems like it's only possible to put one bubble per dimension. This could be ok if the associated spreadsheet expands that out so "4X 3.5±0.05 ⑤" on the drawing becomes 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 in the table. I haven't figured out how to generate the inspection spreadsheet yet, but I'm guessing this feature isn't there.

A couple other things I'm noticing:

1. The video has ① on a basic dimension?!? By definition, you should not allow inspection bubbles on basic dims. You can inspect the geometric tolerances associated with the basic dims, but not the basic dim itself. Although you're in good company, as I can't count the number of FAIs I've gotten back where the "inspector" has checked all the basic and reference dimensions. 🤦‍♂️
2. At many companies there are two or more classes of inspection dimensions (e.g. FAI - first article inspection, IQC - incoming quality control). I see that there are options here for bubble/flag types, but it seems like there's only one set of numbering. In my experience, each class has its own numbering. I could see changing a drawing standard to get the automation, but it will be good to understand what's possible, and what might be in the roadmap.
3. I don't see a way to align the bubbles with the dimension text. Inferencing allows me to align one dimension with another, but I can't do this with the bubbles. I like that I can move them wherever I need to, but there should be the ability to align them when I want.
4. I'm used to having the total count of inspection items shown as part of the main notes. Is there a way to get this information and add it parametrically to the notes?
5. I get that once a drawing is released and in production, there are very good reasons to lock inspection numbers to certain dimensions. However, depending on the stage of development, it could be really nice to reset this lock and renumber everything. I'm also curious what happens when I delete a dimension with a locked inspection number?

George_Anderson

Jake_Rosenfeld said:@George_Anderson this change was intentional.  It provides consistency between the origin and the default planes, which are all now considered "Construction Geometry".  Before, only the default planes were "Construction Geometry", and the origin was not, which felt inconsistent to us internally.

If you have a workflow that breaks due to this, please feel free to discuss with support and we can try to find an adequate solution.

It doesn't break my workflow, and I agree with that change for the origin. It's unfortunate that other points explicitly created by the user are also considered Construction Geometry -- it would be useful to be able to set that in opPoint, but it's not a big deal.

George_Anderson

ilya_baran said:

@George_Anderson Please submit a ticket for these.  I'm not aware of intentional changes in the area (and I would at least know about precondition analysis), so it would be good to track this down.

Submitted just now.

aeromorrison

Excellent updates. All things I will start using immediately.

PeteYodis

@S1mon I would encourage you to submit tickets, one topic at time on Inspection Items.  This is just the beginning.  On the topic of basic dimensions, it's handled differently (perhaps mistakenly so or not) by different companies so we don't block attachment of inspection items to them.  Really, it's a needed value in order to inspect something.  A true position tolerance on it's own would not really stand either -  you would need to know what the theoretically perfect distance is as well.

IQC is going to be fairly niche, but if enough customers want it we can certainly do it.  

We have an improvement for snapping behaviors on the inspection items

Yes, there is a new property for every drawing tab named "Inspection count" and it's controlled by Onshape and the item numbering process.  You can certainly reference that in your notes if you want, just insert the drawing property for it.

Deleting a dimension with the inspection item won't make that number re-useable IF it's already been in a release -  but if not it can certainly be re-used again in the drawing.  

Getting the information out is part of the export process.  Just right click on a tab and choose Export and then choose the Inspection list type.  

Effendi_H

Awesome improvement one

Just thought the inspection feature will more have flexibility for users to choose their preference character (alphabet or special char) instead the number. Thanks,