Dragging Features

If I drag a feature to the end of the Feature manager (reordering it)
How come when I "Edit Sketch" all the features "gray out" and I'm back to
the original position when the feature was created?

This is a surface revolve feature.
What am I doing wrong here is there a simple "work around"?


what a drag....

 

Because the sketch predates all those features.

Jim S.

 

Yeah, this is kind of a hosed up part of the software, and more than a
little confusing, although it's a lot better than it used to be. If you
drag a feature from the top to the bottom, and there are no relations from
later sketches to the sketch, then when you edit it, it works like its at
the bottom of the tree, If there are relations to the sketch (meaning
something after the sketch makes a relation or dimension to it), then the
feature moves to the bottom, but the sketch really stays at the top.

It's an easy experiment. You can make a block with a cut, and then copy
the cut several times (ctrl drag). There are no relations between the cut
sketches, so you can reorder with impunity, and when you edit the sketch,
everything above it will remain active. But, if you go to the second cut
sketch and make a dim that goes to the first cut sketch, and then reorder
the first cut and edit the sketch, all the cuts will be grayed out. You
could check the parent/child list for the sketch to see what is dependent
on what.

It becomes a little more complicated if you're trying to reorder sketches
used in a loft or sweep (multi-sketch features). SW will tell you that you
can't reorder sketches that are absorbed into other features. When SW
creates the loft or sweep, it reorders the sketches Profile, Path, GC, GC,
etc. If you expand the sweep so you can see all the sketches and put the
rollback bar between the feature and the first sketch, it will temporarily
unabsorb the sketches and show them in their original order. I still don't
think it allows you to reorder them then.

Anyway, I hope this helps a little rather than just confuse you more.

matt

 

"take the garbage out, dear"

To add to what Jim and Matt said, there is also a minor bug that I've seen
when moving features and/or sketches around. Some times when I move a sketch
or feature just above where I want it to be so that I can get access to the
sketch in the feature below, it will still be greyed out when I open the
target feature. If I move it two or three features up, it will become
available. Then I can move it down to just above the target. Fortunately, I
haven't yet run into the situation where I can't move it a couple of more
features up due to another dependency.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems

 

Sometimes I'll have a sketch that I want to move up the tree, and it won't
move because of external references. So, I edit the sketch, delete all
relationships, and close. Then, I move it up the tree, re-edit and
re-establish new relationships to define the sketch.
Best Regards,
Devon T. Sowell
www.3-ddesignsolutions.com

 

Me too.

One tip, particularly handy if there are lots of relations: Choose
"External" from the scrolling box before deleting, in order that internal
relations (dimensions between elements of that sketch, horizontal, parallel
etc) are retained and do not need to be re-established.

No doubt Devon knows this, but others might overlook this option.