Viewing Assemblies/Parts Outside Documents

colin_starker933

I have a mess of duplicate assemblies and redundant documents on my hands and they need to be consolidated. I started by searching for "type:assembly name:<name>" to find duplicate assemblies with shared keywords in their names. The results were a little confusing. It appeared to be showing every document that all assemblies with <name> were in. The same assembly showed up several times. What I expected to to see is the assemblies themselves so I could sort those out before tackling the documents that reference them.

I might be missing something here. How do I see just an assembly, not the document that contains it? Is this even possible? Must a part or assembly always be referenced in at least one document?

I read this page on documents, but my question was not addressed (or it was implicitly and I didn't see it.)

STEG

Can you show a screenshot of what is the problem? 🤔

martin_kopplow

There are no files in Onshape, so yes, you guessed right: Neither a part nor any asembly can exist without a document. A part or an assembly that 'lives' in one document, can be referenced to in another document, so you might see two instances of the same part, in different places, and without making a file copy. This has implications on what you may want to delete and what you shouldn't. This also has an impact on what you find when searching for part names, for the search might find the same part in different places.

colin_starker933

martin_kopplow said:

There are no files in Onshape, so yes, you guessed right: Neither a part nor any asembly can exist without a document. A part or an assembly that 'lives' in one document, can be referenced to in another document, so you might see two instances of the same part, in different places, and without making a file copy. This has implications on what you may want to delete and what you shouldn't. This also has an impact on what you find when searching for part names, for the search might find the same part in different places.

The parts's history travels with it, right? A change made in Doc A to Part B will also show in Part B's history in Doc C, correct?

It sounds like the search interface is a bit lacking. It should list the part/assembly as a single entry with an expandable "where-used" tree underneath it for all parent documents and assemblies. Think of Autodesk Vault.