Welcome to the Onshape forum! Ask questions and join in the discussions about everything Onshape.

First time visiting? Here are some places to start:
  1. Looking for a certain topic? Check out the categories filter or use Search (upper right).
  2. Need support? Ask a question to our Community Support category.
  3. Please submit support tickets for bugs but you can request improvements in the Product Feedback category.
  4. Be respectful, on topic and if you see a problem, Flag it.

If you would like to contact our Community Manager personally, feel free to send a private message or an email.

Finding drawings related to parts

brucebartlettbrucebartlett Member, OS Professional, Mentor, User Group Leader Posts: 2,137 PRO
One thing I wish I could do is to open the related part or assembly drawings via an RMB if the drawing exists either in that workspace or another version. At the moment the only way I can see to finding drawings easily is structuring the document with drawings next to the studio or assembly tab. If using the search tool you have to make surer drawing name is in a good format A few times I, have ended up with multiple drawings for the same parts as there is no indication of an existing drawing. I've also found multiple page drawing can cause drawing to be lost too. 
Engineer ı Product Designer ı Onshape Consulting Partner
Twitter: @onshapetricks  & @babart1977   

Comments

  • brucebartlettbrucebartlett Member, OS Professional, Mentor, User Group Leader Posts: 2,137 PRO
    Adding to this, if you were able to see a list of where this part is referenced. So if you right-click a part and there is an item for "Reference locations", it could list out where this particular part is used in drawings, where it is derived, and where it is used in assemblies, or if there is no other reference for that particular part.
    It is easy to go the other way by clicking the "open linked document" from a derive or drawing.
    Yes this is exactly what is needed 
    Engineer ı Product Designer ı Onshape Consulting Partner
    Twitter: @onshapetricks  & @babart1977   
  • tim_hess427tim_hess427 Member Posts: 648 ✭✭✭✭
    Totally agree that having a place to see links and references would be great. After reading this, I was hopeful that a workaround could be adding the part number reference to the title block of a drawing, and then searching for that. However, it doesn't look like that information is searchable. Bummer.
  • BulletEngineeringBulletEngineering Member Posts: 24 PRO
    This can partially be solved by including the part number in the drawing name. I also name the parts by their part number. Searches for the part number will result in the part along with relevant drawings.

    Equivalently, both parts and drawings have a part number property. Using the same value in this field for all drawings relating to the same part, and searching using the part number field of the advanced search tool with find all the related drawings.


  • tom_macphailtom_macphail Member Posts: 11 PRO
    This can partially be solved by including the part number in the drawing name. I also name the parts by their part number. Searches for the part number will result in the part along with relevant drawings.

    Equivalently, both parts and drawings have a part number property. Using the same value in this field for all drawings relating to the same part, and searching using the part number field of the advanced search tool with find all the related drawings.


    Sounds like a reasonable work around in lieu of a suitable alternative (which I think is a critical feature).
    Can you give an example of how you use this approach without causing confusion around the drawing number and part number on the drawing?
  • BulletEngineeringBulletEngineering Member Posts: 24 PRO
    All of our drawings have a Part No. field which references the part property from the drawing view (make sure to insert/make drawing from the part, not the part studio!). We manually set the Part Number drawing property to match. The Name drawing property is what we use to store the Drawing No, if needed.




     We usually do not use a separate drawing number in our system, rather we add additional pages to the one-and-only drawing for a given part number. By filtering the search to "Drawings" or "Parts" we can find one or the other selectively. There are exceptions, of course, and in those cases we add a Drawing No field to the sheet format that references the Name property of the drawing. 

    To cut down on redundant search results, we set the release state of non-active drawings (in versions or old releases) to "Obsolete" or "Discarded" and select "Released" or "In progress" as search filters when actually trying to find active data.

    To speed things up further, I made a google sheet with formulas to pre-enter the search filter criteria into a URL. The sample formula below, assuming you put the part number into cell A2, will create a URL to an Onshape search page that will find all released drawings with that search term in their Part Number property field:

    =HYPERLINK(CONCATENATE("https://cad.onshape.com/documents?nodeId=1&resourceType=filter&column=modifiedAt&order=desc&viewMode=0&q=type:drawing partnumber:"",A2,"%22%20state:RELEASED%20foundin:v%20when:all"),A2)


    P.S.  when all is said and done, we often end up duplicating the same part number into five separate property fields:
    Part Studio - Name
    Part - Name
    Part - Part Number
    Drawing - Name
    Drawing - Part Number

    It is sufficient, however, to ensure that just the Part - Part Number and the Drawing - Part Number properties match.
  • Theo_RTheo_R Member Posts: 81 PRO
    edited July 2020
    Equivalently, both parts and drawings have a part number property. Using the same value in this field for all drawings relating to the same part, and searching using the part number field of the advanced search tool with find all the related drawings.
    I'm really suffering right now with this same problem.

    I opted not to take this workaround.
    The drawing isn't really the same PN as a part, if you have multiple parts on a drawing, then what? What happens when you need multiple drawings of the same part?
    Also if you use the release process and you want to avoid duplicate PN this is not feasible.

    IMO this is the largest gap in OnShape offering right now. I'm trying to tie a few other platforms to OnShape via API and this is one of my roadblocks.

    If anyone has a solution for the API (some lookup) that might address this, please let me know.

    @brucebartlett any solutions in the past year and 4 months since you first posted this?
  • tim_hess427tim_hess427 Member Posts: 648 ✭✭✭✭
    Agree - a "where used" function is sorely missing. 

    I've taken the approach that @BulletEngineering uses - All of my part names, tab names, and part studios have the part number listed for clarity. Our quality system is also very old school so the drawing number and part number are considered the same thing, so I end up releasing all drawings and parts with the same part number and just keep the revisions in sync. 

    Having an efficient way to link drawing PNs to part PNs would be a critical thing needed for us to start improving our system and workflows, I think. Otherwise, I'm not sure how to keep track of related parts and drawings without some sort of external spreadsheet to track everything. 
  • Theo_RTheo_R Member Posts: 81 PRO
    Seems to me this is very similar to whatever is driving the "Recursive Linked Document Updates"
Sign In or Register to comment.