Assembly features

For an assembly, OnePart retrieves the list of direct children. In this example, for the 16 children:

• Children are displayed in order of decreasing size (bbmax).
• The number of children that exist for the assembly display in the gray box
• The number of identical parts display in the green box -
• The number of instances that exist for the assembly display in the blue box
• The number of configurations displays in a dark pink box for the part

This symbol means that although these components are referenced in the assembly, the children files are not found where expected, usually resulting from a mismatch between the content of the assembly and component files, which have been saved in an inconsistent state or moved without maintaining their relative position on the file system.

Files are often moved to a different location therefore, at import time, files may have been copied to a new location. This can break the mapping between the parent and child. You can override the global strategy used for the individual assembly.

The image below shows that 16 components are referenced in the assembly, however, the children files were not found where expected. The last child has 2 instances in the assembly.OnePart provides a configuration button in the Children panel to bring the user to the Assembly strategy mapping; see Individual assembly mapping strategy.

• Use the configuration button to change the strategy in the Assembly mapping popup.

Example: Children panel with 16 lost children.

OnePart proposes 5 strategies to resolve the relationships between parent and children. You can set the strategies at a global or assembly level.

You can set which global strategy to use in the user Preferences. The original path is the part’s path location when saved in the CAD software. The file path is the location where OnePart found the part at import time.

Strategy	Description
S0 - As saved;	Looks for children based on the original “saved-as” path location for both parents and children as referenced in the parent’s assembly.
S1 - Folder of the link	Looks for children based on the parent’s original path location plus the child’s filename. In this case, both parents and children must reside in the same original folder.
S2 - Folder of the pointing document	Looks for children based on the parent’s path location at import-time plus the child’s filename.
S3 - Relative folder	Looks for the children based on the child’s original relative path location and the parent’s location. OnePart will compare the original file paths for the parent and children to determine the child’s relative path. It then uses the parent’s file location plus the relative path to find the children.
S4 - Everywhere	Looks for the child filename in every possible file location.

The default global strategies by family are:

• CATIA V5 - S2
• SOLIDWORKS - S0
• Pro/ENGINEER - S2
• Inventor - S2
• NX - S1
• Solid Edge - S2

The lost children can be found for every assembly on an individual basis in the Children panel. The Children panel is located in the Preview page. Click on the Assembly mapping icon to access the strategies.

Example: Assembly strategy mapping screen for a SOLIDWORKS assembly.

Although S0 is set by default, we see here that S1, S3 and S4 can find this assembly’s children.