Naming convention on sketches and features?

dave_franchino

Hey folks,

I have a quick question about naming features in Onshape.

Coming from SolidWorks (at least as I remember it), a feature's sketch is a child of that feature. In Onshape, however, sketches exist separately in the model tree, which makes it easier to reuse them for multiple features. While this is useful, I’ve run into a small annoyance: I like to name entries in the model tree for better organization, but I find myself having to name both the sketch and the feature separately—which feels redundant and annoying.

A few questions for the group:

A) Is there a best practice for naming features and sketches?
B) Do most people name both the sketch and its associated feature, or is there a common workaround to streamline this?
C) What naming conventions do you use? My current approach is to keep the "Sketch" prefix with a descriptive name (e.g., "Sketch - Mounting Holes") and do the same for features (e.g., "Extrude - Mounting Holes"). This keeps things clear at a glance without relying on icons, but manually naming both still feels like extra work.

I realize this is a pretty minor detail, but I’m curious about what others consider best practice.

Thanks!

S1mon

In an ideal world, you name everything. However… when you're under a deadline, that can go out the window. At a bare minimum, I try to keep major sections of features in named folders so future me (or my colleges) can figure out what I was doing. If I spend more than a few seconds finding which sketch or feature created some particular geometry, I make sure to name it. Major layout sketches always get names.

I try to always make it so that my complete tree can be collapsed to a single screen height without scrolling. Obviously this is dependent on your screen resolution and browser zoom level, but the basic idea is not to have hundreds of features with no folders. Even with decent naming, this is hard to navigate.

One thing to keep in mind: in Onshape you can search/filter by type of entity, so strictly speaking, if you're renaming things, you don't have to keep "Sketch" or "Extrude" in the name. I often do leave it in anyway for ease of searching, but it's something to consider. In a typical feature tree where sketches are followed by extrudes or revolves, I'm more likely to rename the sketch than the feature. Usually more of the modeling complexity is in the sketch, not the extrusion. If I'm going back to modify something, it's the sketch.