topic Re: Trying to duplicate drawing and change it's design references. Now have prob in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Trying to duplicate drawing and change it's design references. Now have problem.

jackwcallen — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 21:13:06 GMT

Hello,

I have an exceptionally exciting question about duplicate designs that won't delete.

I need to make a number of assembly drawings made of an assortment of various component designs.

I have a project structured something like this:

(The parts in their own design)

A010

A020

A030

A040

B010

B020

B030

B040

etc...

(And separate assembly design's with the above part designs inserted in)

C001 (with A010 and B010 inserted in)

C002 (with A020 and B010 inserted in)

etc...

I made a drawing for assembly C001.

After looking up how to duplicate this drawing and then just change the assembly design reference (say C002), it became evident that others had found this isn't possible.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-design-validate/change-referenced-model-in-drawing-view/td-p/7724969

However I thought I had found a workaround.

From remembering how to copy a design between projects. I proceeded to download the 2d drawing (.f3z) for C001 from the web. And uploaded it back into fusion 360.

As I expected this gave me a copy of the 2d drawing for C001 and the C001 design itself.

What I hadn't counted on was that I also got a copy of A010 and B010 which were the part designs inserted into the C001 assembly design. Although I can understand why they had been copied.

Upon trying to delete them it said "A version of this design has been referenced by drawings or other designs and cannot be deleted". Again this made sense, and in the "used in" section for them I could indeed see that they were referenced to the copied C001 design.

Not a problem, I called the copied C001 assembly design and drawing C002, removed the copied A010 and B010 part designs from this C002 and inserted the original B010 and A020 as required. I now have as I wanted, C002 drawing readily created with minimal changes requried.

Looked at the "used in" for the copied A010 and B010 designs, which it said "This item is not referenced by any other designs" as expected, because I had removed them from C002.

Proceeded to delete the copied A010 and B010 designs, but it still said that they are still referenced and are now stuck and won't delete.

Before I proceed to do all the assembly drawings this same way, I need to work out how to delete these duplicates, otherwise I could end up with a lot of them.

Hopefully someone can unravel my question, which makes some what of sense in my head.

Regards

Jack

Re: Trying to duplicate drawing and change it's design references. Now have prob

jackwcallen — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 21:03:55 GMT

Screencast of problem.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/community/screencast/5c9c787b-60fd-4755-b804-72f831927646

Re: Trying to duplicate drawing and change it's design references. Now have prob

dbigham — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 12:48:28 GMT

I am having this exact same problem when uploading a fusion archive of a drawing and it's part. It will become a real mess if the unused files can not be deleted.

I am anxiously waiting a solution.

Thanks,

Re: Trying to duplicate drawing and change it's design references. Now have prob

jackwcallen — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 17:31:37 GMT

I posted the same question on the support page, as it seems to be a bug.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-support/trying-to-duplicate-drawing-and-change-it-s-design-references/m-p/8179101#M32616

An autodesk support person suggested that a previous version of the design maybe referenced.

But this is not the case as the version history is lost during the duplication and the version is reset to 1.

Re: Trying to duplicate drawing and change it's design references. Now have prob

dbigham — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 18:32:33 GMT

I have tried promoting the earlier versions part and checked for reference but I don't see anything. In my case it could be a bug created when I renamed the model and drawing files. I am using this upload of the archive file to create unique copies of sheetmetal panels where I can change to panel sizes and only have to update the drawings as opposed to recreating the drawing.

There should be a more direct way to do this as it saves a ton of work. But as it is now I have two files which I do not want but can't delete.

Thanks,

Re: Trying to duplicate drawing and change it's design references. Now have prob

cmiller66 — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 20:12:41 GMT

Hi Jack and David,

I asked around about this and this is a known limitation. The issue is that when you upload the drawing, parent assembly, and xref, even if you delete the xref reference in the parent design, and save (parent is now r2), r1 of the parent design still references the xref, so you can't delete it or r1 of the parent design.

The workaround some users have used is to create a trash bin-type folder in the project, named something like zzzzzzzzz so it's always at the bottom, and just move these unwanted files there. Not ideal, but unfortunately at present it's the way to (sort of) work around the problem. I will forward this request to the team to see if anything can be done to improve this experience in the future.

Thanks,
Chris