Best practice for high parts count

graham_lock

Hi,

I'm new to Onshape and my first 'real' project is to design some garden decking.

Essentially I will have decking boards, edging boards, fascias, posts, joists, noggins, etc, etc.

I have limited experience with Fusion 360 and using that I'd probably create separate components / sub components for each part type - boards, edging, etc, then each component would have its own timeline and I could easily control each component's visibilty.

In my Onshape project I have a single Part Studio and a Variable Studio.

I have grouped actions on the timeline into folders, i.e. boards, edging, etc. 

I patterned boards in the sketches rather than patterning parts.

I cannot union board parts as they don't touch each other.

My problem really is that the parts list is long and since parts cannot be grouped it is extremely difficult to control visibility of part type groups, i.e. hide all boards for example.

To date my project only has the board related components, so before I add posts, joists and noggins I thought I'd seek some advice.

Would I be better off going down the assembly route even though all parts are fixed relative to each other?

Any help appreciated.

Many thanks.

eric_pesty

I think you will get much better performance using part patterns than sketches. One way to "group" things in a part studio is to create composite parts, this would make it easy to show/hide stuff

However, it seems like the frame tool(s) would be the better option for this (including generating cutlists and composite parts)

graham_lock

Thank you for your reply. I wasn’t aware of either of your suggestions.

i just tried the composite part tool as that’s the easiest to try first.

I found that if I rename the part in the creation dialog that name is not used for the part. I had to RMB rename.

Also if I double click on the composite part the dialog doesn’t open to allow me to edit the entities.

i presume the above two behaviours are not expected?

Thanks.

graham_lock

I've answered my own question on this one - I was getting confused between the timeline entries and the Composite Parts group entries.