Naming Parts/Assemblies in an assembly

iain_downs

Probably a silly question, but Google has not helped me..

I have a whole load of parts.  Some I put in an assembly (called 'support').  I add two of these support assemblies to an other assembly and I went to call them left support and right support.  I can't see any way of changing the names from support<1> and support<2>.

Thanks

Iain

Tony_C_

You need to right click on the assembly where you see it in the far right "tabs" window (hit alt+t or click the little magnify glass in the lower left to turn it on/off), not the "instances" window.

iain_downs

Thanks for you're reply Tony.  However, I think you are telling me how to change the name of an assembly.(in the example below) the I have an assembly 'Support' with two instances in this assembly.  They are called 'Support<1>' and 'Support<2>'.  I want to change the names of them to 'Left Support' and 'Right Support', but when I right click there is no rename option.

Thanks

Iain

Tony_C_

Oh...In that case you're going to need to copy that assembly and name one "support left" and the other "support right."   That <1> is just indicating how many of that assembly/part you have in your assembly. 

emerson_bottero

You can just mirror it in the studio. Than you will have 2 different parts. If you wanna change them later you can always drag the mirror feature to the end of the tree.

michael_hills168

The Mirror technique is an interesting solution for wanting differently named duplicate parts (not assemblies as in the original question, but definitely relevant). Also, in the case that a mirror image of the part is not desired, "Transform"/"Copy in place" can be used to create a non-mirrored duplicate part.

Copying an assembly and renaming seems like a maintenance issue if you ever want to make changes to the subassembly. Then you need to change the copy as well. To avoid that issue, create a second assembly and insert the first into the second. Rename the first and second to be "left" and "right", then insert both of these into the final assembly. If you've already inserted the subassemblies, a slicker way to do this is to just right click on each subassembly in the main assembly instances list and choose "Move to new subassembly". Then rename that subassembly.

Neither of the above solutions scales well. For example, I have kitchen with 112 doors. I created a configurable assembly for the doors, so all the different sized doors have the same name in the main assembly.

The imperfect solution I used was to group doors by cabinet in named folders. I could have also put individual doors in named folders. This is not ideal because if I name an individual door by putting in in a folder, I can't group them since folders can't be nested. The grouping could be managed using subassemblies, but then I'd end up with a lot of tabs and need to switch tabs frequently to make edits.

Putting each instance in a named folder could work well for the OP's situation (though I don't think folders existed back then), but it still requires more clicks and screen real estate to expand these folders.

The current system of adding a serial number <#> after each instance annoys me since parts or assemblies are then labeled by the order in which they were added, which has no significance. It also looks messy when part<56> is inserted between part<4> and part<5>. That's fine for a default name when instances are inserted, but I would really like it if I could edit the number, ideally setting it to a non-numeric value. So, for the OP's example, change "Support<1>" to be "Support<Right>" and "Support<2>" to be "Support<Left>". I think that would address the OP's issue very nicely. It might be even cooler if the user could change the position of the <> in relation to the part or assembly name, allowing the name to be "<Left>Support". That way, in the case of a long assembly name, the instance list could still be pretty narrow and still have the customized name visible.