"None of the selected entities could be deleted"

daniel_s_wolf

In Onshape, I find it very easy and pleasant to create sketches. For me, the fun stops when I have to make modifications to an existing sketch. Whenever I try to delete entities within a non-trivial sketch, I get an error message stating that "None of the selected entities could be deleted."

This seems to happen whenever any entity I'm trying to delete is connected to the rest of the sketch via a constraint. Since a typical sketch contains *lots* of constraints, it often takes me several minutes to find the constraint(s) I need to delete in order to be able to delete the actual entities. By this time, I usually deleted some required stuff along the way and end up with a broken sketch.

Is there something I'm missing? Is there a simple way to delete parts of an existing sketch?

Edit

It seems that I've been doing it wrong. Let's say I sketch a rectangle. To delete this rectangle, I expected I could simply click within it (selecting the face), then press Delete. I thought that would delete its constituent lines. But that doesn't work. What I have to do instead is select all four lines by drag-selecting, then press Delete.

Is there a shortcut to select exactly the lines that make up a face? Doing a drag-select will often select other, adjacent entities that I don't want to delete.

john_mcclary

Okay yeah you don't select the inside face.

to select the entities in a sketch you can try right-clicking on a sketch entity and select the option from the menu "create selection" (may have got the name wrong) and you can select tangent edges or similar length edges Etc.

But to be honest most of the time it's just as easy to just select the entities one at a time or window select and then unselect the fewer features inside using another window select while holding shift.

john_mcclary

Can you link an example?

I have never experienced this before. Selecting an entity and pressing delete doesn't care what constraints are attached. They usually get deleted as well automatically.

Is the sketch derived from another studio? Is the sketch imported from a DXF?
You say non-trivial, there may be a hint that your sketch may be too involved. It is good practice to break sketches down into smaller parts. I know that is not what you want to hear, but it is the only advice we can give without real examples.

owen_sparks

Yeah, I agree there is something odd going on with this behaviour, I've never had to remove a constraint to be able to delete geometry before.  Hopefully it's an easy fix.

Owen S.

john_mcclary

Okay yeah you don't select the inside face.

to select the entities in a sketch you can try right-clicking on a sketch entity and select the option from the menu "create selection" (may have got the name wrong) and you can select tangent edges or similar length edges Etc.

But to be honest most of the time it's just as easy to just select the entities one at a time or window select and then unselect the fewer features inside using another window select while holding shift.

owen_sparks

daniel_s_wolf said:

Edit

It seems that I've been doing it wrong. Let's say I sketch a rectangle. To delete this rectangle, I expected I could simply click within it (selecting the face), then press Delete. I thought that would delete its constituent lines. But that doesn't work. What I have to do instead is select all four lines by drag-selecting, then press Delete.

Is there a shortcut to select exactly the lines that make up a face? Doing a drag-select will often select other, adjacent entities that I don't want to delete.

Yeah, that rectangle ceases to be a rectangle as soon as it's created.  It immediately becomes 4 lines each with horizontal or vertical constraints, coincident constraints and dimensions if you set them.

I think there was an IR for some sort of smart tool to enable the selection of perimeter geometry by clicking on a region.

O.S.

billy2

@daniel_s_wolf have you tried windowing around the rectangle to select it?

Remember left to right windowing is inclusive and right to left is intersecting.

Seems like windowing should work.

Also, this is a pro/e thing, simple sketches and more features tends to create more robust designs. Now this will be controversial, but I think it's still true. In pro/e we'd recommend no more than 10 sketch entities.

Brad_Goodman

I have found this happen a few times where I cannot delete some weird face inside a sketch. In the times I have seen this - it is because I have chosen the face of some object as my sketch pane - and (for some odd reason) - this face becomes an undeletable face within my sketch.

The solution is to create a NEW sketch pane (use the desired face as basis - with an offset of zero) and re-parent your sketch to this.

This ONLY happens when you use a face of another body as the pane for your sketch - instead of an actual "plane".

owen_sparks

Hi folks.
At the risk of sounding like a **** sketches in Onshape don't have faces. (Just entities such as lines splines vertices etc.) These entities may form "regions" that will then be rendered in grey to show that they are fully enclosed. One can't delete these regions, so to remove them requires deleting the entities that form the region.
I've not seen any bugs that prevent the deletion of sketch entitties so wonder if something else is a play here?
Oh and merry new year too.
Owen.

john_mcclary

@Brad_Goodman that is a 'feature' which lets you infer geometry from the selected face. To bypass that, you have 2 options.

1) create a new plane
2) use the mate connector in the sketch face selection to make an 'plane' without adding a plane feature on the tree.