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Improvements to Onshape - September 20th, 2024
Roy_Mutalik
Member, Onshape Employees Posts: 37 
We're more than halfway done with the month of September, and due for another Onshape release. Let's take a look at some new features.
GENERAL IMPROVEMENTS
DERIVED PRESERVES ACTIVE SHEET METAL MODELS
The Derived tool includes a new option to Preserve active sheet metal models. Selecting this option maintains the bend table and flat pattern for the derived component, so you may continue to edit the component as a native sheet metal part.
INDICATION OF UNDER-CONSTRAINED SKETCHES
Any under-constrained sketches in your Part Studios are now indicated in the feature list with an icon and a tooltip.
REPAIR MANAGER - SUPPORT FOR CONFIGURATION CHANGES
The Repair manager now maintains consistency between the Part Studio and the Repair manager panel, even when changing configurations.
NAMED POSITIONS - MATE FEATURE CROSS-HIGHLIGHT
When working with a Named position table, hovering over a mate now cross-highlights the mate feature in the Features list and shows the mate on the model in the graphics area.
USER-DEFINED OVERRIDE FIT CLASS TOLERANCE (DRAWINGS)
You may now fully customize and manually override a Fit class tolerance dimension on a drawing. From the Tolerance display, select the Override precision/tolerance checkbox, and then select User defined.
DRAWING STYLE PANEL - SKETCHED OBJECTS
The Drawing Style panel now supports sketched objects, such as lines, circles, rectangles, and splines.
ENTERPRISE IMPROVEMENTS
STRUCTURE VIEW
A new Structure view option is now available from the Documents page.
Structure view shows the latest released components, with all contained references indented below. The top-level node shown in Structure view will always reside in the selected folder you have navigated to, but the references below are shown exactly as they are in the structure of the design, even if they reside in separate documents and in other folders. Structure view is a new way to quickly understand a full reference tree, properties, and revision history for your complete product.
Note: Structure view is available today for companies using Onshape Enterprise. However, we expect to add it for companies using Professional licenses in a future release.
ANALYTICS - FILTER BY DOCUMENT IN RELEASE AUDIT
The Release Audit report now includes a filter for Document, allowing you to quickly look at all releases contained in just one or more documents of your choosing.
ANALYTICS - DARK MODE
Enterprise Analytics now maintains consistency with Onshape dark mode.
RENDER STUDIO IMPROVEMENTS
TRANSFORM ELEMENT
It is now possible to Transform all element types in Render Studio scenes with the exception of faces. Rotation and scaling transforms now take place around an origin point automatically placed at the center of all of the selected elements.
HIDDEN AND SUPPRESSED IMPROVEMENTS
Performance improvements have been implemented in this release to make hiding and showing parts in a Render Studio faster than before.
Additionally, components can now be suppressed or unsuppressed in a Render Studio. Unlike hiding a component (which is a per-user/session action), suppressing or unsuppressing an element persists across sessions. See the help documentation for more details.
DUPLICATE APPEARANCE
You may now easily duplicate an appearance from the Appearances list's right-click context menu. This is extremely useful for any appearances you have heavily customized. You can duplicate the appearance to make a variation, without having to recreate it from scratch.
PERFORMANCE - APPLYING APPEARANCES
Changes have been made to how part, assembly, and subassembly appearance data is handled. You will find improved performance when assigning appearances to a large number of elements at once. This change also helps with loading times in Render Studios with a large number of parts and appearances.
DARK MODE FOR RENDER STUDIOS
Dark mode support has been extended to include Render Studio.
FEATURESCRIPT IMPROVEMENTS
CUSTOM TABLES ON DRAWINGS
FeatureScript custom tables can now be placed directly in Onshape Drawings.
FILTER FEATURESCRIPT NOTICES
It is now possible to search and filter notices directly in the FeatureScript notices panel.
TEXT REFERENCE PARAMETER
You may now import a .txt file as a string to be used as a reference parameter in your custom features.
LEARNING CENTER IMPROVEMENTS
INTRO TO PART STUDIOS COURSE
In our ongoing effort to improve the material offered in the Learning Center, we have added the Introduction to Part Studios course. This will be a complete replacement for the previous Part Modeling in Part Studios course. It has a completely new layout including new videos and exercises.Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. For a detailed list of all the changes in this update, please see the changelog.
Remember: The updates listed here are now live for all users when creating new Documents. Over the next few days, these features will also be available in Documents created before this update.
Comments
Full sheet metal derive! Been waiting soooooo long!
Yep, active sheet metal derive will open up some options for sure!
We often find ourselves creating "too many" SM parts in a part studio resulting in poor performance (but we live with it because it's so convenient!)…
Now we'll be able to derive them elsewhere to add small details and help overall regen performance!
Configurations in repair where an issue so glad to see this fixed!
I'll be doing some rendering soon so glad to hear about performance improvements there!
Holy Cow, what a MASSIVE update! Onshape knocked it out of the park with this one.
Structure View and preservation of Sheet Metal in Derived parts will immediately benefit our Enterprise.
Thanks, Onshape, every 3 weeks is like Christmas.
I see a hidden featurescript in the updated std library :)
setDimensionedEntities.
Structure View is going to be a game changer! As professional users, we wait with bated breath. 3 weeks pretty please? :)
Love the derived sheet metal improvement…that would have saved my bacon circa 2021 on my camper project.
As a formerly abused SW user, it still amazes me to get these quality of life improvements instantaneously, every 3 weeks. I frequently stumble into an improvement, and I can't help but be surprised: holy cow, again? already? this much? Truely an addictive experience. Our old SW admins / company would stay 2 yrs. behind for stability, and when it came time to update… it was an at minimum weeklong process, newbies and graybeards alike groaning and grumbling the whole way.
Cheers Onshape, keep the good times rolling!
Another great release!! Thank you Onshape!
Custom tables in drawings is fantastic. Solves so many problems.
Custom BOMs, Cut lists, so many options.
Text data input is great. That is going to be really helpful for some weird workflows.
I can pretty much write my own file importers in FeatureScript (ie, SVG, or any text based format).
The 100kb file size limit is a bit small, but I'm still happy to see it.
Custom FeatureScript and Onshape Integrated Applications
Nice touch on the "indicator of under-defined sketches" - small thing, but very useful.
Structure view looks amazing, and so many other goodies.
Under constrained sketch indication is one of those things I've missed since day one of using Onshape. I've lived without it but happy to see it finally.
Text files and custom tables are going to enable so many things…
Very chunky release, great work guys!
Structure View has been long awaited, but I have a couple of IRs
-Have it be available/visible from inside a Document like the in a panel similar to the Tab Manager
- Can it be available for Assembly's and Drawings that are not yet released?
CAD Engineering Manager
@Caden_Armstrong @Jacob_Corder
I'm surprised you didn't mention notice filtering — that's been a big pain point for me when writing FS and I was thinking about you guys when we built it. Has fishing for notices in a document with lots of tabs not been an issue for you?
The derived sheet metal could not have come at a better time! I'm working with a customer that also has Onshape and the documents are owned by them but I want to derive parts into our document(s) for us to assign our own part numbers and such. Now I can put a flat pattern on the drawings!
@adrian_vlzkz I've created some tickets for you. We have improvements for everything you mentioned. We can discuss more in the tickets. Usually people have some imagined state other than Latest Released in their mind, even if we don't have that imagined state implemented yet.
Thanks Pete, yes maybe like a manually way to generate the Structure without having to go thru a Release Candidate/Workflow
CAD Engineering Manager
So… something like a Design Review, but not needing to be gated by part numbers and revisions?
Wow - so much to be excited for in this release:
Derived sheet metal will be a tremendous help for deriving a family of (now sheet metal) parts derived from a master configurable model
Structure view is something I've been waiting on for a long time…. it reminds me of the way the old SW workgroup PDM ;) made it so easy to see what was in an assembly
Great QOL improvements to under-defined sketches, drawings, render studio, and featurescript
THERE'S A REPAIR MANAGER!?!?
Not gonna lie this update made me gasp over and over so much I'm going to need an inhaler
I love every single new feature bar a couple that aren't relevent to me, and the custom tables in drawings almost made me explode!
Woah nice to see a Sheet Metal improvement, this one will be well used. Hopefully a sign of more to come like Conical and Loft!
Drawing styles for sketched objects is a big one for me. Many thanks for the update!
I did notice it, but its never really been that big a pain.
I find the majority of debugging I do is focused on debugEntities, if something is failing its a bad query 9/10 times.
Custom FeatureScript and Onshape Integrated Applications
Is there a way to disable the visual indicator for under constrained sketches? I never constrain anything.
Why are you using a parametric modeling tool?
@S1mon to be fair they're probably hyperbaling. Though I get the need to hide the indicator as it's just one more thing to notice and think about.
@reftfgyhiugjfhytgdrf an auto constrain feature would be helpful though especially for imported DXF's.
I usually just constrain my sketchs even when I don't need to, and a good habit to learn is to constrain the sketch as you draw
@ilya_baran I love the text reference parameter - super useful, thank you! The 100kb is a pretty small limit - would it be possible to increase? I'm still working around this with a json input since those aren't limited and just embedding my text string in the JSON.
Great new features!
However with the new underconstrained indicator a new constraint "constant length" would be helpful. So I could use it for all supporting lines where the length value itself is not relevant. Using a dimension each time to make it a certain lenght is not helping to keep the sketch in overview. So just the current value as constant value was much more easy and I can use it for all supporting lines at the same time.
Indicator for Under-constrained sketches is really cool. I also like the option to change styles for 2D sketches - but it would be nice if it will be available also for 3D sketches, shown on 2D drawing views.
And in the changelog there's neat improvement, which adds possibility to add inspection item to THRU value in Hole callout. So cool, no more custom grouped Callouts.
Yes.
Seen Structure View on the horizon for a while, great to have it Released, this is a big part of getting in-house non-CAD Light Users who only care about Released data interfacing with our Enterprise to self serve information..
Custom Tables on drawings. At Last. A great reason to finally brush-up my feature script skills as the Custom Table now has somewhere to go!
Great work Onshape, keep it up!
…and basic sketching on drawings, really good.
@ilya_baran That was my favorite part of the update. I spend hours looking for specific fs notices and this updated filtering will definitely help with reducing that time. I just forgot to mention it and credit you guys on your constant hard work.
@Jacob_Corder
Thanks! I was asking because this story was scheduled based on my experience, rather than lots of customers asking for it, and I wanted to see if that matched other FS devs' experience. So @Caden_Armstrong's feedback here is really valuable as well — as we think of ways to make debugging easier, we'll pay special attention to queries.
@ethan_keller924
What would a reasonable limit be from your point of view? And are you able to get good performance processing such giant strings?