How to manage publications to share one Part, but that part lives in a Part Studio with other parts?

Jon_H

I use publications more and more and find the concept very useful and overall user friendly.

Sometimes it takes a bit of time to explain to 3rd parties / non Onshape users how to navigate a Publication but that's fine.

One thing that constantly generates errors however is when sharing a part in a multi-part part studio, where some users have a lot of trouble finding the right part to look at / export and when exporting it's very easy to export a merged STP/STL file by exporting multiple parts at the same time.

Real-life case : 

Part Studio A contains parts X, Y and Z.
Part X and Y needs to be 3D printed internally for prototyping.

• create a version of the document, or a revision of those two parts
• create a publication
• add parts X and Y
• this creates two tabs on the left, both referencing Part Studio A, both showing Parts X, Y and Z
• user is confused why both tabs show "the same thing"
• user is confused why some of the tabs show the Name and the Version of the Part Studio, while others show the Part Number of the Part being shared (makes it difficult to decide on a consistent way to indicate which part is the center of interest)
• user is confused that sometimes using the export tab it exports the entire part studio, sometimes it exports the single part. Sometimes it applies the export rules to name the exported files, sometimes it just uses the Part Name.

Am I missing something or does this need to be more fleshed out ? It defeats one of the big modeling advantage of Onshape which is the multi-part Part Studio, I don't want to have to separate all those parts in individual Part Studios and go back to "external references" / derived geometries / in-context to drive parts that are intrically linked together, modelling in a single environement for those types of parts makes it so much easier and smoother.

wayne_sauder

I'll have to say this has been a deal breaker for me and the number one reason I do not bother with publications. I would love to see this addressed or a good workaround. 

Rhett_Robinson

Would this work for what you are wanting to do? Only one part studio lives in the publication, but the person exporting chooses the configuration (X, Y, Z, or All). I have the delete part at the end of the tree configured to a selection.

Jon_H

@Rhett_Robinson thanks for the idea, still not user friendly for non-CAD users.

In my view, publications are made to abstract away the CAD part and leave only the relevant data, without any posibility to make a mistake. Your proposal means the CAD user has to manually make these configurations, name them in a way that is consistent (and keep this up-to-date), and most importantly it becomes very confusing when the part studio already has configurations.

It also makes the left pane mostly irrelevant.

What I think we need is the ability to select a single part, and have that part be displayed in a tab on the left pane without any context and no way to access the other data in the part studio. There could be a "include context" box to tick to go back to the way it works now.

Happy to hear other ideas, I'll leave this here for a few days and if no solution is found I'll post in the improvement requests.

adrian_vlzkz

My thoughts are, to create a individual Part Studio for each Part, using the Derive feature maybe. In our environment anything that needs a Part Number gets its own Document with Part Studio and Drawing. The way we see it is, once a design needs to be accessed downstream or by external teams, needs to be more granular for control/access.

claus_bertels093

I totally agree that it should be possible to add seperate parts to a publication. It's very common for different parts that are designed together to be sent to different suppliers. Where can we vote on this feature?

Design_Bro

Agreed. Have we made a feature request for this?

As of now, this is going to require the creation of derived parts; which at that point, I might as well just keep part studios to single parts and go back to a solidworks workflow.