Where-Used and other "standard" PDM Information

scott_gold

Excuse me if I haven't found it yet, but I was trying to discover how powerful the "find" abilities of the PDM are. I'm used to working with fairly large assemblies with mulitple levels of sub-assemblies. We also re-use individual parts in various top-level assemblies. Of course, finding the part and then where its used is extremely important when making changes. 

First, I had trouble just finding a specific document name for a part. I made a copy of the Perrinn racecar, and knew there was a "tire" in there. Typing in "tire" doesn't bring up anything. I had to do an advance search and then came up with 4 asm that had "tire" in the name. ok, cumbersome, but doable. But it still didn't beak it down into the part level.

Then I decided to find where this tire was used. Typical where-used query in PDM.  I'm coming up short. Can't figure that out at all.

Now I browsed into one of those subassemblies for the wheel assembly, and I can select the tire itself in the list of parts that are part of the subassembly, but I cannot make it open the tire as a single part model to edit it.

I tried the same thing with some Elmer Engine Model, using the "cover" as an example. I could find it, when I opened it from the search, it gave me the whole assembly. That's not what I wanted. If I need to make a change to the cover, I need to get to that.  When my part numbers are a string of 8 or 10 alpha-numerics, you don't want to make me type that in multiple times, nor have to scroll through a list. Type it in once, click click start editing.

What am I missing here?

--Scott

Jake_Rosenfeld

Hi Scott,

We appreciate your feedback on the 'Where-Used' feature.  We don't currently have this, but data management features like this are on our radar; we are working hard to make them useful and correct.

As for your second question: if you are in an assembly and would like to edit one of the parts, you can right click on the part (either in the graphics area or the parts list) and select the menu option 'switch to <part studio>' where <part studio> will be the name of the part studio that the part was built in (if you have trouble finding this option, it should be right under 'edit in context').

If you would like to edit your part in the context of the assembly you are looking at, you can use our 'edit in context' feature (from the same right click menu).  This will bring you back to the part studio that the part was created in, but also show the assembly around the part, so you can edit the part with references to the assembly.

https://cad.onshape.com/help/Content/in-context.htm

scott_gold

Thanks for the quick response, Jake. I think I found it difficult because the multi-part part studio functionality has been utilized. While powerful, for a typical OEM manufacturer, this probably doesn't work when those individual components need to be reused in multiple top-level assemblies.

Again, thanks for letting me know, looking forward to seeing the product mature more.

--Scott

abefeldman

One of the things you mentioned in your original post was the advanced search. If you expand the "Type" dropdown there is an option to search by Part, which will allow you to open a document directly to the part studio containing the part you're looking for.

philip_thomas

@scott_gold - Most everything except the where-used is already in Onshape. Here are some awesome resources for using the Advanced Search capability.

https://www.onshape.com/cad-blog/tech-tip-using-advanced-search-in-onshape

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/6107/introducing-advanced-search-in-onshape

mlaflecheCAD

Where used in the context of how PDM systems typically define it is currently not a capability.  For example, show all the parts that are located across all assemblies.  We will of course have this in the future.

However, you can locate any version or workspace of a part, assembly, drawing or any other element in a "Document" using the Advanced Search function.  

Take a look at this video session:   https://www.onshape.com/videos/office-hours-with-the-professor-07-20-17
And this document attached here.

bradley_sauln

Here is the What's New post with this being implemented: https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/14671/improvements-to-onshape-october-27th-2020/p1