[/rant]
Ok, I feel a bit better now.
FYI, SE doesn’t do this, and it’s so much better for it.
Can you be a bit more specific with examples..? Maybe I can be of help
Its a difference in behavior and I can see pros and cons to both.
- SolidWorks, suppressing a feature will also suppress downstream features that rely on it.
- Solid Edge, suppressing a feature, does suppress downstream features, it leaves them in on in the tree with errors.
Oh, it’s just a rant, but the tags don’t work on an image I guess.
I’ve asked all over and apparently there’s no way to turn off the “feature” of Solidworks suppressing downstream features when I suppress one upstream feature but just leaves them suppressed. It wreaks havoc on an old process I used regularly in Solid Edge, and I have not yet blead it from my habits. So out of instinct I’ll suppress one thing up stream intentionally to see what’s affected but then all dependents are suppressed but unsurprising it still leaves all those other features suppressed. So now I have to go unsuppressed them all, if I already had some features suppressed there’s no telling them apart. It’s not so bad on my own models, but if trying to understand someone else’s it’s tougher. Then if some features are configured and suppressed for that reason I really screw things up. It’s just very unhelpful behavior IMO. But maybe I’m just modeling wrong…
I feel your pain. I’ve often fought trying to find the dependency so I can delete a feature that’s no longer needed.
For years people have been asking for the software to show errors instead of suppressing (or deleting) downstream features when another feature is deleted or suppressed, but it hasn’t happened yet. Hopefully it will before I retire.
I can think of a few cases where I would like the SE option. For interrogating the models, you have the parent/child indicators to see what’s affected.
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FIFY, unless they’ve changed something.
The big difference is, in SE when that parent feature is unsuppressed the rest of the features rebuild, in SW they stay suppressed. I don’t understand why people think a failed feature is catastrophic. It’s history based modeling, actually it’s really high level sequential programming language. Change something upstream and down stream likely to fail, sometimes it’s very simple/fast to fix them sometimes its not. That’s the whole process in how I understand it.
Yes there is, it’s just very unconventional.
Now that you’ve suppressed your feature and that the other features have been suppressed, you can note the suppressed feature, undo the process and then go into these features that were suppressed and figure out what is causing them to be suppressed to correct this.
In SolidEdge. You supress the feature, and then go into these features with errors and correct these errors.
In SolidWorks, you can supress the feature, note the undesirably suppressed feature, undo the process, go back to correct what’s necessary in these features, and then and only then can you supress your feature so that your underlying features will not be supressed.
I guess it’s a matter of what you’re used to. I’d rather keep the links, when needed, and correct the unnecessary links, so that the file can be a valid “startup file” for the future.
Those only go one level, need daisy-chained/recursive indicators. That’s why I use the “suppress and see” method that, I thought worked very well and fast in Edge. I just got to get over the SW behavior, but gol-dang-it, it’s extra functionality that’s not desired. I just want to turn that part off! Just let the features fail, I’ll either unsuppress the parent feature or fix it and they rebuild. Often, it’s just one or two little things at the second or third level and all the rest rebuild.
I believe NX behaves the same way as SE.
I loathe other features from SE too:
Synchronous modeling i.e.
How about we make a workflow that ‘copies’ it?
Example (what we are currently ALMOST doing):
- Import geometry (1 feature)
- Modify however you like, use whatever feature
- put it back into only bodies (I requested a macro for this and it’s nice for simplifying a modified model)
- keep body/face/edge/vertex IDs (not implemented into the macro but should be possible, right? And then SWX would keep the mates? One can dream…)
- because it’s imported you can now use feature recognition for things you might want to adjust (i.e. hole wizard etc.)
- use another macro to fix/unfix the sketch you’re trying to modify (leave sketches basically unconstrained most of the time)
- feature tree now only has an imported body plus some features you converted/added in there
It wouldn’t be perfect but it’s something!
And in the consistently inconsistent department. Suppressing a “seed” component in SW does not suppress patterns based on that component. That is one case where I wish it would.
I don’t think we’re talking the same thing here. What you’re suggesting is very much more tedious and slow than toggling a feature off and back on in SE. Much of the time I did it to learn how the model was made, not that I was actually going to delete the feature.
Add this button to your right click or a toolbar. Needs to be there by default IMO. Command has been there since the beginning but it was only accessible under the “edit” menu until they allowed customizing the right click menu.
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most impressive trick in a while!
Yes, indeed, but if the suppression of the feature happens, it is because there is a relation to it.
Is the relation Required? If yes, then keep it.
If no, then remove it and if it needs to remain, have it independant from whatever feature it was in.
How is that different then..? You’re basically learning how the model is made with the process I spoke of, it’s a lot more tedious, that I can agree, but that’s only for now.
It becomes less tedious with time until it becomes instinctive to “know” how to build things without creating useless parent links.
The parent child indicators are the way to go to see what’s related. NX has color coding where you select a feature in the tree and upstream are one color and downstream are another. SE does this but you have to right click and select it.
After my 4 years on NX a long time ago, I hounded the hell out of SolidWorks to add this, alpha tested it for them, and we finally got it a while back.
Again, Parent Child indicators only go one layer in SW. I have them on and use them most of the time. Although I don’t understand why they don’t stay turned on, like they’re a doc setting not a system setting.
It sounds like you haven’t toggled parent features suppressed on off in Solid Edge?
I’ve never actually worked with SolidEdge more then an hour, but I don’t really see a difference between
-Supressing a feature and correcting the errors
-Removing useless parent relations in features so that only the desired feature gets supressed when supressing.
I’ve worked with SolidWorks and AutoCAD, done a bit of SolidEdge at home and also a bit of Inventor, but I wouldn’t be able to help anyone relating SolidEdge/Inventor.
Perhaps you need to rethink the order of your features..?