Best Practices Question - Configurations vs Standard Parts and model overhead

daniel_cook

Just a quick question - say I have a model with ~300 flanges (angle iron that is on the end of pipework) The flanges vary between 100mm and 300mm (in steps of 50mm) in size.

Is it better to create a configuration for a "flange" (which future proofs for anything that comes up in case say, I need a 25mm increment), or just make up my 5-6 parts I need?

Specifically I am wondering what is best practice, and in relation to model overhead, does a 300 instances of a configuration carry a large model overhead that will grind it down vs making myself a catalogue of standard parts?

The same might apply for chutes, etc - I can make a configuration that covers all length and diameter sizes I might need, vs fixed parts.

Thanks!

ilya_baran

From a "clean design" perspective, configurations are the preferred option here.  However, there are some issues we're working on where inserting many configurations from the same workspace can lead to poor performance, especially in drawings.  In your case, I would recommend modeling the flanges in a configured part studio, but in a separate document, and then bringing them in as linked references.  (If you don't want a separate document, that's fine too, just make a version of the combined document and bring flanges in from that version).  From a performance point of view, if you're bringing configurations from a version, it should work just as well as though they were separate parts.  If you find that is not the case, please reach out to support and we'll investigate.

daniel_cook

ilya_baran said:

From a "clean design" perspective, configurations are the preferred option here.  However, there are some issues we're working on where inserting many configurations from the same workspace can lead to poor performance, especially in drawings.  In your case, I would recommend modeling the flanges in a configured part studio, but in a separate document, and then bringing them in as linked references.  (If you don't want a separate document, that's fine too, just make a version of the combined document and bring flanges in from that version).  From a performance point of view, if you're bringing configurations from a version, it should work just as well as though they were separate parts.  If you find that is not the case, please reach out to support and we'll investigate.

Thanks @ilya_baran - I've started doing a configuration library which would live as a separate document to the model they end up being used in.

I'll certainly let you know if there are any performance issues I come across.