part studio granularity best practices and refactoring

jeff_mcaffer

With the help of you all I've been learning onshape and am continually impressed. As yet though, I I've not really grokked the Zen of how complex part studios and assemblies should be. As a result, I find myself frequently wanting to refactor what features are in what part studios. In some cases, this is merely aesthetic (is the part studio too packed? or, do I have too many parts studios to manage?). In other cases, there are functional implications (e.g., you can't derive a part into its own part studio).

In any event there does not appear to be a way to copy features from one part studio to another (though you can copy sketches around). Duplicating a part studio and deleting the bits you don't want from the original and new copies is "OK" for splitting but is prone to loss and redundancy. I don't see a way to merge part studios. This all leads to two questions:

• What's the best way to learn the best practices around part studio granularity? Are there any guides (or guidelines)?
• Am I missing something wrt part studio refactoring facilities in onshape?

Aside, since onshape is (very cooly) based on code, I wonder if we could use some of the facilities seen in software development environments like Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ,.. which all have really rich code refactoring facilities. This discussion is directly analogous to coding and complexity of classes, functions, packages, modules, … We've learned from decades of coding that one's view of "right" factoring changes as one's understanding of the project and scope of sharing evolves. Thus, the need for refactoring.

MichaelPascoe

Here is an improvement request you can vote on for Copy And Paste Features.

Here is the best place to learn best practices and how to use onshape most efficiently: https://learn.onshape.com/catalog?labels=%5B%22Learning%20Format%22%5D&values=%5B%22Learning%20Pathway%22%5D

https://learn.onshape.com/catalog?labels=%5B%22Learning%20Format%22%5D&values=%5B%22Learning%20Pathway%22%5D

-

And this video by @EvanAReese will give you a huge boost with understanding when to refactor your studios and when to keep prototyping.

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/18600/new-video-your-cad-should-suck