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"Near" / "Far" names for MCs for non-standard parts?
Is there any value - beyond consistency - in naming mate connector(s) "Near" and/or "Far" for fasteners which are not part of Onshape standard content? It seems like Snap Mode is enabled temporarily with standard content, but if I enable it prior to inserting non-standard content, it will snap regardless of the name of the mate connector.
What about the direction of the mate connector? It seems to make a difference to snap mode, but I just wanted to know if there are any tricks beyond this.
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
Comments
Has "near" and "far" ever worked consistently for you? I am having difficulties every other time, but maybe it's just me. So; I've not felt like I'd want to use this scheme for custom content.
Related to this, is there any good convention for which way fasteners should be modeled in Onshape relative to the default planes? I prefer to always have the origin and the mate connector that I'd call "Near" be the same location, but what about the direction? Is "top" the plane that corresponds to the mating part?
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
I made an IR a while back about having "replace" in assemblies automatically re-attach mates if an identically named MC exists in the replacement part…
If that ever happened the consistent naming would be great…
Now that I see how things are going, I'm guessing this probably should use a "tag" feature defining a mate(s) for a "library" part, in which case the naming probably doesn't matter much…
Tags are definitely the direction coming from frame profiles and forming tools. I could see that expanding to non-standard common content, if necessary. However, I'm not sure what's going on behind the scenes with standard content.
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
I'm also not 100% privy to behind the scenes updates with the standard content and libraries, but I do know that some efforts are being applied to bring more support for user configurable libraries and tagging such that the tag feature (and hole feature) was rewritten to accommodate. I would be surprised if mate connectors and assembly replaceability were overlooked as part of this feature/improvement request.