Dissolve Subassembly will *Destroy* the original assembly

Andre_Comella

If Assembly 1 is inserted into Assembly 2, and then the user selects Assembly 1 from within Assembly 2 and dissolves it, Assembly 1 will have all of its parts and mates removed *in its own tab*. This is highly non-intuitive and extremely bad behavior for the feature. I'm inclined to think this is just a straight up bug.

NeilCooke

It's not a bug. The dissolve function is used when you want to move all the parts from a subassembly into a top level assembly and therefore the subassembly does not exist anymore.

S1mon

@NeilCooke

It may not be a bug, but it’s unexpected behavior coming from other systems where the dissolved assembly would still exist. It seems like a reasonable expectation that there would be a way to take all the components from a subassembly and instantiate them in the current assembly without destroying the subassembly.

@Andre_Comella
It is possible to change the parameter “subassembly BOM behavior” to “show components”. This will apply wherever the subassembly is used, but it might solve your problem.
https://www.onshape.com/en/resource-center/tech-tips/manipulating-bom-behavior-in-onshape

Andre_Comella

@NeilCooke

Having one tab silently modify another so severely feels like a pretty dangerous behavior, especially since this isn't what users coming from other software are used to "dissolve" meaning. 

There's lots of situations where I would want to dissolve an assembly without destroying the original. Right now I'm working updating some components of our machine that could potentially interfere with a lot of other subassemblies. The easiest way for me to check this, instead of trying in the slow and heavy top level assembly, is to create a smaller, lighter assembly of just the components it might interfere with. And originally I thought the easiest way for me to do that was to import in their subassemblies, dissolve them, and delete all the components I don't need. Instead I'm now adding a bunch of individual components are redoing their mates. 

eric_pesty

One way this could be solved would be allow "dissolving" a version of an assembly. Right now if you the sub-assembly is a version the "dissolve" option isn't available, (which makes sense if the goal is to modify that sub-assembly). However dissolving a version reference would imply that the original isn't affected, maybe it could be called something different than just "dissolve" to avoid confusion.

@Andre_Comella
Since this only works for sub-assemblies in the current workspace, why not just do your checks in a branch so that you don't need to "care" that the sub-assemblies are "destroyed"? This way you can do your checks and make any adjustments without affecting you main design workspace...