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Anyone else keep forgetting to use query variables?
sasha_sklar061
Member Posts: 25 ✭✭
in General
This is definitely going to take some time to build muscle memory. 30 seconds to bind the curves to a variable would have saved me 10 minutes of painful rework!
3
Comments
Hello, @sasha_sklar061
I know that feeling 😅 It’s one of those habits that only sticks after you’ve burned yourself a few times. Early on I kept telling myself “I’ll just grab it again later,” and then 10 minutes later I’m retracing half the query chain because I didn’t store the result.
What helped me was forcing a small rule: if I reference the same query result more than once, it must go into a variable immediately. It feels like a tiny slowdown in the moment, but it saves a lot of backtracking later.
The good news is once that pattern clicks, it becomes second nature. Until then… those 10-minute reworks are unfortunately part of the training process 😄
Vote for my improvement request, this would make it more seamless! I feel like a bunch of the time I am already in the middle of a feature when I realize I should make the query variable.
Create Query Variable Within A Feature — Onshape
I have the opposite problem. I try to avoid rework so hard that I might spend 5 minutes constructing a query variable that I'll never touch again that I could otherwise have gotten the job done with some quick manual selections and been on my way. I consider those cases to be more like CAD calisthenics for when I actually need to build something procedural to save hours though.
Derek Van Allen | Engineering Consultant | MeddlerReally, they're not just for avoiding lots of selections; I tend to use them in cases where I need a selection to be parametric. E.g., select a face to fillet but exclude one edge.
oh don't worry, I also do that 🤣
When I'm building stuff with this emerging qv+/ /amalgamate/pattern workflow that you guys are working on I use it maybe too much. But on surface modeling projects where I'm still fumbling around on foundational concepts I keep forgetting.