Rehome (re-own) a Mate Connector to a Part

Jonathan_Hutchinson

I have a part which has been derived and had some extra operations performed on it. What I've noticed (and there is a forum topic somewhere that noted this), is that performing something like a Split, or an operation which creates multiple parts, then eliminates the Mate Connector -> Owner Part relationship. I get it, there has to be only one owner to a mate, right.

I would suggest (and request one of the two behaviours; maybe they're available already?

• Make it possible to use an existing mate connector and 're-home' it to a part as a feature. I can kind of do this with FS, at the risk of creating a duplicate in-place mate on top of one that is existing. But not a super nice solution.
• I don't know if some sort of dynamic feature would be possible whereby you can select which should be the designated owner part in a situation where ownership is having to be redecided (or, eliminated, as is the current behaviour).
• On a side note, should operations (such as split) on parts that are owners of mates, where the owned status is about to be lost, maybe have a nice helper status balloon notification as is typical in some features to warn that this status is to be lost? Or maybe have the yellow mark on the feature (so it's warned but not failing with red).

The nicer and more elegant solution I think, which is sort of in between, is to use an existing mate and re-own to a part. But I don't see any capability to do that via FS (only opMate).

Thoughts?

MichaelPascoe

If you need both sides, you could duplicate the part with Transform. Then instead of splitting, you could Extrude remove half of each part, this way the mate connectors stay with their owners.

nick_papageorge073

I use mulitmateconnector featurescript a lot. It still loses the owner with a split (I believe), but its easy to create multiple MC's at the same place for each part. They can then be used to make the assembly simple and extremely reliable. (unlike fix + group).

Jonathan_Hutchinson

I solved it in the meantime with my own FS that just just creates a new mate, referencing a known mate, deleting the old one. feels clunky but a decent short term fix. One thing I don't yet see though is how to set the mate connector name from an FS string parameter. Surely it's not just to be left default as Mate connector 1?