Use generated Part Number and Rev in features (text) - please help formulate a good feature request

Jon_H

Hi there,

So I'm trying to push to add (engrave) the part number on a selection of parts we push out to manufacture. For this the easiest way in my view is to add the part number directly on the 3D data (extrude-remove a text sketch)

What I think I want is to open a sketch, add a text box and use the property "part number" and "revision" so it automatically updates whenever that changes (which happens even for the part number, for example in confogured parts). At least this is how I did it in other CAD softwares (Inventor, SW).

I would like to avoid featurescrips (even though we use a lot of those that are freely available for other things), as it's not possible to have the script update the text without re-running the feature and we're bound to forget to do that all the time before release.

We're using Onshape's part number generation so there's no need to generate anything, "just"make the "part number" property available.

Doest this make sense, am I missing something ? Just want to avoid the XY problem when posting a feature request !

MichaelPascoe

Hi @Jon_H,  this makes sense to me, I've wanted something similar several times and I know others have too. Unfortunately it is not possible to avoid FeatureScript as all of Onshape's native features are written with FefatureScript. 

Here is an improvement request you can vote on that would allow this kind of property functionality to be created: 
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/10861/getproperty-in-featurescript

Jon_H

Yes this is the point of that post, to make a feature request that make sense for that use case. I think in this case it's not about exposing the part number to the featurescript but to ask Onshape to modify the software so part number is accessible just like say a variable.

EDIT : 

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/21676/part-number-and-revision-property-accessible-as-a-variable-in-text-boxes-in-sketches#latest