Part Number History/Product Structure View?

S1mon

While overall I very much like the project/document/part studio structure of Onshape and the concept that a release can contain one or more parts/assemblies/drawings/etc.. I am getting a bit frustrated with keeping on top of part numbers. It's way too easy for a part in a part studio to lose its ID and need to have its properties fixed again. A few things might help this situation:

1. Better history of releases: The "action items" history of releases is a start, but it would be great if each release could be expanded to show each item (part/assembly/drawing) which was released along with the revision, state, etc. If this could also be sorted by part number or part name, that would be very helpful.
2. Make part number obsolescence explicit: Yes, in a non-significant part numbering system, "part numbers are free" and burning through them really shouldn't be an issue, but I don't want to accidentally give the same part several different part numbers during development. There should be some sort of error or warning when a part number is no longer attached to a part, almost like how most explicit Mate connectors need to be attached to a part.  

Onshape Live 23

@pete_yodis
During Onshape Live 2023 (starting ~6:17 mark), you demoed "Product Structure View" which seems like it might solve many of the issues raised in #1.

A few questions:

1. Would it have a full history of all the released items or only released/pending as shown?
2. You quickly showed the revision history tab, but it's not clear to me how this would capture the potential previous use of a part number. 
3. Could this idea be expanded or connected to the action items history of releases?
4. How will this folder oriented view work if I'm looking at the contents of Project A, but Assembly B has parts from Project C?

I'm very much looking forward to whenever Product Structure View will be released.

adrian_vlzkz

Product Structure view is a great step in the right direction, as we grow our implementation tracking documented and workspaces/versions is becoming a problem.  For Enterprise implementation more control is necessary, as projects/products move thru the their lifecycle, the need for collaboration changes to need of control and clarity.

S1mon

@pete_yodis

@PeteYodis

It would be great if you could enlighten us on this. Thanks.

PeteYodis

@S1mon

Onshape Professional and Enterprise users are going to see this all come about in various different deliveries by us in our typical agile fashion.  You will see our list view effort come first with some amount of functionality.  We will be working towards a structure view and that will come some time after we release list views.  In between we will follow up with useful additions that will work with list views and also later with structure views.  Of course we will be taking feedback all throughout the process as we always do.  The design can certainly track where our users want to take it most.  I would say our earliest efforts are really about getting you good visuals and tools to locate the list of latest released components, in a way where users can browse and explore without needing search first to find things.

1)  Initially list views will come with latest released data only as far as what can be queried for and shown on the page.  You will be able to see revision history in a panel on the right, as well as properties, where used, etc... and of course you will be able to open directly to the point in history where the component was released and then explore/dig from there if you need.  So, you could certainly get at a fuller history by exploring the document history when opened.  A pending state filter is not going to make the cut initially, but we very much would like to bring that about over time.  Of course if there are different states you would want to see/know about we would like to know as well.

2)  I'd like to probe what you mean by previous use of a part number.  Our where used view can let you look at that information for previous revisions and versions of that component.  I'm not sure if you mean "use" in that way.  The revision panel lets you look at all the previous revisions and the releases they were a part of previously.  You can open directly to the component from here as well, OR open the release package itself without leaving the page.

3)  I'm not exactly sure what you mean by an action items history of releases -  so perhaps a support ticket might be good on this one.  

4)  For list views, only the components located in this folder will be visible.  For structure view, we will actually distinguish components in the design that reside in different locations other than the current view scope.  This behaves similarly to the experience of opening documents within the folder as you would see components in studio tabs, and also linked components within assemblies.  I mention view scope, because one of our efforts I did not show would be to look re-cursively down in all subfolders and bring the latest released contents to the list OR the structure view when we have it.  This effectively could mean you could build an entire view of all latest released components for the entire company by clicking on the company node, and then setting an option in the UI when we have to include all subfolders.  This recursive look will not be a part of our initial release, but we do have plans to bring it about when we can. We think that will be a very popular option in constructing the views.  

Hopefully this starts to clarify the picture and some of your questions as we get closer to you actually being able to use the functions.  We're pretty excited to be getting to this point as we think these views will really help make your data standout in ways that people won't really need to know much about documents and their structure/organization.  It hopefully will put your designs front and center rather than documents, and helps even non cad users do useful things with the data.

S1mon

@PeteYodis

Thanks for the detailed reply.

2) We have unfortunately made some mistakes in the past releasing a few things with part numbers that we shouldn't have used (we've been migrating from a Creo and Airtable based CAD/pseudo-PLM system). So when we try to release parts with these part numbers again, we correctly get an error, but it's a bit more complex than I'd like to quickly see that a mistake was made and correct it. I'm honestly not sure what the best approach is at this point, but perhaps that's better in a support ticket.

3) There are two ways that I know of currently to get a general idea of what has been released - I can do a search with the right properties set, or I can look under "Action items"/Releases...

The trouble with the Action items/Releases view is that it takes several clicks to see what parts/assemblies/drawings are in each release. It would be great if this list was hierarchical and could be expanded with a short list of the things that were in the release. I have a lot of challenges figuring out the right way to name releases to be useful, especially when they can contain many items. Then there are the release emails (which really needs some help), revision history dialogs, etc..  

Here are some relevant threads and improvement requests:

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/18113/releases-part-studios-workflows-etc

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/18462/automatic-naming-of-revisions-in-release-candidate
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/20462/add-basic-information-to-revision-history-dialog
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/10563/thumbnail-images-in-release-emails
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/18763/link-to-release-way-to-notify-user-after-released
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/18159/make-released-parts-easier-to-find