Is there a replace sketch entity tool?

ryan_mcgoldrick

We sometimes design products starting out on the basis of an existing product cad for the purposes of maintaining a structure and for maintaining a lot of the ground work that has already been done if a product is going to be similar enough. This however can be a bit limited in Onshape as to my knowledge there is no replace entity tool meaning if you delete a sketch entity and put a new one in, any subsequent features will fall over and fail. In Solidworks this tool is available and we use it.

This is fairly problematic on projects for us as we tent to have a master sketch file that propagates many child studios etc one get around is the transform tool but that is quite limited in what you can achieve.

Is there another work around or is this an improvement request that is being worked on?

Thanks,
Ryan

lana

@ryan_mcgoldrick
We will do it, but filing an improvement request would help to prioritize this. Oddly enough - I did not find one ( may be I'm not good at searching).

chadstoltzfus

This could be done by using a custom feature that uses the subtract complement function of opBoolean(). This way, the only thing that has to be changed with a sketch is replaced is the extrude selection and the selection of the subtract complement feature. 

The way I've done it before is I create a bounding box around the part, and then do a subtract complement with the original entity as the tool and the bounding box as the target. This makes it so regardless of the size/position of the part, the cuboid, which has the same id every time, will be the resulting part. This can be applied to more than boxes and is pretty robust, but I haven't stress tested it to great lengths. 

Here is an example with a very quickly whipped up custom feature, so use with caution. https://cad.onshape.com/documents/c26b4d40838c9b9b72117e97/w/ed0e93c5c398483cda2d6b2a/e/18303ec92703b0b780d07d8a

lana

@ryan_mcgoldrick
We will do it, but filing an improvement request would help to prioritize this. Oddly enough - I did not find one ( may be I'm not good at searching).

ryan_mcgoldrick

Legends, good to know it will be done and is on the radar, I have raised an improvement request.

Cheers,
Ryan