Part Names (Selecting and "inhereting")

Brad_Goodman

I am making a design which generates a lot of parts via patterns and arrays. Two questions:

FIRST: Is there any way to control or determine how the names of parts will be inhereted (or not) when being duplicated either through:

1. Translate (with copy)
2. Array (linear)
3. Circular Pattern

It seems the behaviour I am seeing is somewhat random. If I take a part named "LED" and duplicate it (through one of the three above techniques) - sometimes the resulting parts will be called "LED" - sometimes they will be "Part 123" (or whatever

SECOND:

Now I have a sea of parts. Combining them into a compound part is good - but - whether I do this or not, I need to somehow select all these parts. Is there any way to simple select a bunch of parts with a common name, or ones that are "obvious duplicates" of another.

THIRD (Piece of data)
Sometimes the complication comes from when I am duplicating (three methods above) more than one part at a time. (i.e. in a single operation) Maybe this is complicating this? I don't know.

S1mon

If you are going to make compound parts later, why not pattern things in a way that you don’t create so many new parts to begin with? There are a lot of interesting ways to pattern things (features, faces, etc), perhaps sharing more about what geometry you want might help us help you.

You can filter parts by name, and then use that to help make selections, but only in assemblies. I’d focus on the modeling approach first.

eric_pesty

Agree with @S1mon suggestion to avoid creating identical parts in the part studio. But if you do need to select identical geometry, the "create selection" tool with the "select pattern" does a good job of that. You should be able to use that to filter out what you need (using hide other parts) and then box select what's left.