Finding Parts

john_humpherys

If I am starting a new document and I want to use a part that I designed in another document long ago, how do I go about finding that part so I don't have to re-design it?  I can see no way to search for an individual part name when I may not remember what document it belongs to.  This would seem to be a very common scenario.  Once I get hundreds to thousands of documents, each with their own part library, how can I find a previously designed part without using an 3rd party file management system to show where a part resides?

mahir

I can see the benefit of being able to search by part name, but I don't think it's realistic that there would be no recollection whatsoever of the document in which a part resides. Possible yes, but not likely. Even if you remember something simple like the customer name or basic design type (compressor, frame, etc), then you should be able to narrow down the likely suspects. If you have that much trouble remembering where parts are, try tagging documents with a "reusable" tag which marks them as having a potentially useful part.

robert_morris

My SolidWorks folder currently has several thousand parts and assemblies, plus their drawings. Each of those have their own part number. Many of those parts are used in multiple products.

On the desktop, those files are nicely organized by type and then by part number.
In Onshape, I could potentially in the future have a few thousand more parts scattered in various documents. There are multiple people here using Onshape, so I won't know exactly where everything is.

The real problem lies when someone comes by and asks for a drawing for a specific part number. Or they want to know what assemblies (there could be many) use a specific part. Currently there is no way I can do a search within Onshape to give them what they need.

I made an improvement request here: https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/3806/advanced-document-search
You can go there and vote for it. The more votes it gets the quicker it could get implemented.

owen_sparks

mahir said:

I can see the benefit of being able to search by part name, but I don't think it's realistic that there would be no recollection whatsoever of the document in which a part resides. Possible yes, but not likely. Even if you remember something simple like the customer name or basic design type (compressor, frame, etc), then you should be able to narrow down the likely suspects. If you have that much trouble remembering where parts are, try tagging documents with a "reusable" tag which marks them as having a potentially useful part.

I would disagree with this sentiment.  I have an ever growing list of documents with ever expanding numbers of tabs within them.  Before the "move to document" feature was introduced I had often designed components in one file and left them there only to think later that I could reuse part of it.

Sure I could identify the file with some effort and find what I wanted eventually.

However things I'd like to see:-

(a) Search from within my docs for an individual part or sketch by name.
(b) The above built into the derive feature such that I can just type say "magnet" into the box and pick anything that I've designed that has magnet in the name, displayed with preview icon.
(b2) Derive with preview list generated from one or more doc tag names, not file names.
(c) Preview icon in the existing docs list to be able to be set by the user, not just whatever state the doc was last used in. (So i want to specify this tab, viewed from this angle, with these parts visible.)
(d) Hovering over preview icon in existing docs list explodes it into preview icons of each studio within that doc (in a big cluster) so we can see all widgets in the doc.  Preferably whereby clicking on one of the icons opens the file and selects that part studio.
(d) Search on multiple keywords in filename and doc tag selections.
(e) The moon on a stick.

Cheers,

Owen S.

mahir

I stand corrected. As a lowly free user, I didn't imagine how many files some users/companies could generate. I did upvote the advanced search enhancement, though.