Is it possible to have multiple users viewing different display states of an assembly at once?

Jeremy_Gear

We have run into an issue where we have multiple users working in an assembly and when switching display states it seems to switch display states for all users which is very frustrating. Is there another tool we should be using to create or manage display states for user to work in different areas of the design at once?

S1mon

Isolate and Make Transparent are temporary viewing states per window/user. You probably want to focus on using these commands. You can't save selections for these commands, but you might be able to organize your instance list in a way that makes it easier to recreate the appropriate selections (folders can be useful, or filtering by names).

Hide/Show is per workspace and affects all windows/users. These are really less useful because of how they affect everyone. I'm ok using them temporarily on documents that are unlikely to be opened by multiple users at once.

Display states are built on top of Hide/Show and it sounds like they affect all users.

I like to set up assemblies so that "show all instances" will leave the assembly in the correct state for whatever the released revision is. 

You may also want to look at configurations to suppress parts for those situations where one user is only working on a subset of the parts.

S1mon

Isolate and Make Transparent are temporary viewing states per window/user. You probably want to focus on using these commands. You can't save selections for these commands, but you might be able to organize your instance list in a way that makes it easier to recreate the appropriate selections (folders can be useful, or filtering by names).

Hide/Show is per workspace and affects all windows/users. These are really less useful because of how they affect everyone. I'm ok using them temporarily on documents that are unlikely to be opened by multiple users at once.

Display states are built on top of Hide/Show and it sounds like they affect all users.

I like to set up assemblies so that "show all instances" will leave the assembly in the correct state for whatever the released revision is. 

You may also want to look at configurations to suppress parts for those situations where one user is only working on a subset of the parts.

tim_hess

Honestly - if multiple people are actually "working" and editing the model at the same time, this seems like a good use case for branching in merging. Each user can create a branch and work in their own workspace un-affected by people working in other workspaces. 

I also wish there was a way to force "view-only" mode for the times you just want to inspect something but don't want to affect ongoing work or accidently change something. Even show/hide create actions in the document history which could obscure actual model edits. 

eric_pesty

Another related "tip" that may or may not be applicable is that if you just want to look at an assembly in "view only" mode, you can pick the last version (or microversion) before the workspace and then you can show hide things without making any actual changes that would affect other users... This also works if you want to rollback the tree in a part studio to understand how a part is made for example.