Improvements to Onshape - July 21st, 2023

cody_armstrong

We are back with another exciting update for you. This update includes one of the most requested features in Onshape's history! So let's dive in. 

GENERAL IMPROVEMENTS

CUSTOM KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

You can now customize keyboard shortcuts in Onshape. Initially, only commands with default keyboard shortcuts assigned can be customized.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/96j0pdwkog

BOM TABLE IMPROVEMENTS

You can now right-click a cell in a BOM table and "Switch to" that Part Studio, Assembly, or Linked document. This makes navigating your design via the BOM table much easier.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/1mbukbnc5a

PUBLICATION IMPROVEMENTS

Enterprise/Company Export rules are now supported when sharing publications with people outside of your organization. This makes it easier to share Publications with vendors, contractors, and others and ensure your company's naming conventions are maintained. 

DRAWING IMPROVEMENTS

CENTERLINE IMPROVEMENTS

You can now add a centerline in a drawing by selecting a single silhouette edge. In the past, this required 2 selections. 

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/140frlam52

INSPECTION ITEM IMPROVEMENTS

In a released drawing, you can reuse previous Inspection item numbers when reordering the items. During this process, a warning displays if you attempt to use an Inspection item used in a previous revision.

ENTERPRISE IMPROVEMENTS

ANALYTICS PANEL

Document analytics can now be viewed directly from the side panel of the Documents page. The Document dashboard shows valuable information like Modeling Time in the Last 7 Days,  Document Actions Performed, Tab Types, Modeling Activity, and Access Locations.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/dcxtcbf8y4

IOS IMPROVEMENTS

CUSTOM KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

Custom keyboard shortcuts assigned in the browser are supported in the Onshape iOS app.

LEARNING CENTER IMPROVEMENTS

VARIABLES AND EXPRESSIONS COURSE

You will find a new self-paced course for Variables and Expressions. This course covers a variety of practical applications, ranging from using variables to define multiple dimensions, to advanced rules-based design techniques that utilize both variables and advanced expressions.

TIPS FOR HIGH QUALITY SURFACES TECH BRIEFING

You will find a new "Tips for High Quality Surfaces" Tech Briefing has been added with this update. This tech briefing contains important tips to create quality curves and surfaces for more stable, high performing models.

Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. 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 Documents. Over the next few days, these features will also be available in Documents created before this update.

Tyler_Arthur

Very grateful for the custom keyboard shortcuts!

xTimRice

BRB, recoding my entire keyboard 😃

S1mon

Keyboard Shortcuts is definitely one of those "Finally!!" moments. Not sure what all the challenges were, but very happy that this is finally happening. 

"Initially, only commands with default keyboard shortcuts assigned can be customized." I assume that means that full customization is coming. PLEASE PLEASE also add the ability to do custom keyboard shortcuts within feature creation. 

See https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/20300/improved-workflow-keyboard-shortcuts-within-features

The BOM and analytics shortcuts are nice ways to get to useful info faster. I always like seeing things like this where the response is often, well of course that's how it should have always been.

[edit to add:]
The Tips for High Quality Surfaces is quite good. I'm very happy to see this. There are many points that I've learned over the years and strongly agree with. I'd love to see more training, tips/tricks and focus on stuff like this.

adam_geary

All aboard the custom keyboard shortcuts bandwagon!

S1mon

Buried in the Change Log is an item that I wrote an improvement request for, "Support endpoint extension adjustment for offset sketch splines". I'm happy to see this added, but deeply disappointed to see how it was implemented. You can trim/extend offsets, but when it extends, it clamps it to a linear extension. While this may be occasionally helpful, it's taking a heavy degree-3 spline and almost (?) instantaneously flattening it. I can't tell if this is even technically G2 internally. 

While "exact" offsets (really, a very tight tolerance approximation) definitely have their place in machine oriented CAD, for ID/Class-A purposes, approximate offsets which try to closely maintain the degree and parameterization are very much needed. It should also be relatively easy to trim/extend single span Bézier curves while maintaining their shape and degree.

Here's a slightly improved version of the Tiller-Hanson algorithm. Keep the same degree, keep all the control polygon sides parallel, and adjust the distance between the parallel sides to keep sampled points at the desired offset. This is just done with relations in the sketcher, and can be a bit twitchy, but I assume that within some reasonable guidelines, an approximate offset could be done well.

romeograham

Wow - nice work as usual folks!
Especially excited about the "reuse Inspection Items" functionality - this will save me from assigning Inspection Items before our quality team has a chance to weigh in on the important dimensions.

wout_theelen541

I really like the new BOM navigation and the logic courses

Chris_D_Mentes_001

The holy grail of features!!! THANK YOU.
Do we have any idea when we'll be able to add custom feature scripts to the shortcuts?

emagdalenaC2i

Great update!!
En este enlace podéis ver las Novedades de Onshape en español:
https://youtu.be/GiG94i_qpGs

john_mcclary

OH YES! Keyboard Short cuts and BOM switch to partstudio

This is huge!

Good work Onshape team

nick_papageorge_dayjob

I like the BOM table update, thanks.

Dumb question, for the users who wanted customized keyboard shortcuts, are you going to make them whatever your prior cad system was? Or some other letters entirely? Just curious why that's such a requested feature?

I had my own mappings for years in ProE/Creo, but in that case, I'd press two letters and it might replace 6 mouse clicks for common operations. It saved a lot of time. In this case, it just seems to change the letters you press, but not shorten any sequences.

PS, I'm glad you got what you want, just trying to find the reason as I'm not seeing it:)

Axel_Kollmenter

I came back from vacation, had all the prototypes I wanted on my desk and saw these fantastic new features! Is it Christmas already??

JosefBurjeta

This update is really cool. Custom shortcuts will be massive improvement in workflow, I really need to figure out which key for what feature would be best.

Reading the changelog, thanks for fixing issue with flipping arrow of auxiliary view - that was really annoying.

Going through tech tip for high quality surfaces, I'm really grateful for that. I always pointed my colleagues to another sites (like Alias workbench) but having the ground rules summed up in Onshape tech tips is nice to see and I believe it will greatly help users, who are new to surface modeling.

Dericx

Great improvments !
Will you also consider "vocal" shortcuts soon?

jelte_steur814

Thanks a bunch for the Tech Brief on surfacing quality. i definately picked up a few things that can help me improve. especially overbuilding and trimming is something i would regularly do but now I'm more aware of why its better and how i can apply that trick even more.

However I also have some questions about the topics. some examples that i could not reproduce. Who/where can I correspond with about that? (e.g. i see a boundary surface to a kinked edge which in my attempts cannot be reproduced)

Kit_Buchanan

Unfortunately it looks like the keyboard shortcut update has broken in contact with a non standard keyboard layout! Pressing a key sends through the letter as if it were a QWERTY keyboard, not the layout assigned in the Windows OS. All was working properly before this update - this is the only step back i've seen so far from the Onshape team. I can't even reassign all shortcuts to what they should be as they will then be wrong when using a workstation with a QWERTY keyboard again!

john_mcclary

Kit_Buchanan said:

Unfortunately it looks like the keyboard shortcut update has broken in contact with a non standard keyboard layout! Pressing a key sends through the letter as if it were a QWERTY keyboard, not the layout assigned in the Windows OS. All was working properly before this update - this is the only step back i've seen so far from the Onshape team. I can't even reassign all shortcuts to what they should be as they will then be wrong when using a workstation with a QWERTY keyboard again!

Yeah, I've got a support ticket open for this

bill_schnoebelen

Anyone have a list of keyboard shortcuts and you don't mind sharing? 😁

MichaelPascoe

Nice update team! Thank you.

The Variables and Expressions course was great! Definitely recommend it to all.
Love that you included variable feature patterns in there. I learned quite a few helpful tips:

• The lowest variable table will override the upper tables if a value is duplicated.
• When importing variable studios, you can choose to import a single variable instead of the whole table.
• Imported variable studios show a blue icon when there is a new version available.
• When creating a variable feature pattern with sketches, the fixed constraint will keep the sketch from moving around.

Re-mapping current shortcuts is a good start, though I can't say I have a need for that. Something we all are likely interested in would be creating shortcuts for any button or custom feature. There is a work around using the search bar and a custom macro, but that will be no match for a built in hot key.

john_mcclary

john_mcclary said:

Kit_Buchanan said:

Unfortunately it looks like the keyboard shortcut update has broken in contact with a non standard keyboard layout! Pressing a key sends through the letter as if it were a QWERTY keyboard, not the layout assigned in the Windows OS. All was working properly before this update - this is the only step back i've seen so far from the Onshape team. I can't even reassign all shortcuts to what they should be as they will then be wrong when using a workstation with a QWERTY keyboard again!

Yeah, I've got a support ticket open for this

Kudos to the Onshape Support team for quickly fixing this issue (albeit temporarily).
At least I can continue to work as before, just without the option to customize shortcuts until then. (I'm totally fine with that rather than having to think where the key is on a Qwerty board)

Thanks Team

Josiah_Harthcock

Great job guys! 

pollen_robotics

Kit_Buchanan said:

Unfortunately it looks like the keyboard shortcut update has broken in contact with a non standard keyboard layout! Pressing a key sends through the letter as if it were a QWERTY keyboard, not the layout assigned in the Windows OS. All was working properly before this update - this is the only step back i've seen so far from the Onshape team. I can't even reassign all shortcuts to what they should be as they will then be wrong when using a workstation with a QWERTY keyboard again!

Hello, I have the same problem!

S1mon

As a follow on to the custom keyboard shortcuts IR which has been marked complete, I've created a new IR for more customization: https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/21469/more-custom-keyboard-shortcuts 

S1mon

Another detail around the new extend a spline in a sketch capability: it works for offsets, but not for "use edge" splines. It doesn't even extend it as a line the way it now does with offsets. Hopefully this will be improved.

See this IR: https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/18824/allow-extension-of-beziers-when-using-edge

franco_otaola507

Hello, I notice a bug regarding the shortcuts which is quiet strange.
I am using an azerty keyboard and when I press the 'q' button (that writes the q letter) in onshape it selects arc instead which is the (a) shortcut instead of construction (q) shortcut. this wasn't happening before.

brad_heller383

Would still like to see the availability of windows fonts.

eric_pesty

It's about that time again!

john_mcclary

Oh cool. 
We're going through a SW upgrade to 2023 right now. It's taken a few hours, plus some testing for new bugs. Now we can push to the rest of the computers.. Man is that annoying.. 

It will be fun to turn around and tell them by the way Onshape updated too while you were mucking about with SW 😂

john_mcclary

Note to self. Don't assume you can start a vacation week when upgrading solidworks on a Friday Morning..