What is the difference between Delete and Remove a Component or Body?
Accepted solution
The wording here is admittedly non-obvious.
Remove is what we used to call a "soft delete". This creates a feature in the timeline that removes this body or component. If you go back in history before the Remove feature, the body or component will exist.
Delete is "get rid of all traces of this object that have ever existed". It is essentially the same as deleting the feature which first created this object. To use the popular time-travel analogy: Delete is going back in history and shooting someone's father, so that person never existed at all. It is a big hammer, but is sometimes needed.
Regarding naming: We had a lot of internal debate about this. "soft delete" was not popular. But, I feel that "remove" and "delete" are the exact same words, semantically, so you just have to remember which is which. Any suggestions about what to call these two concepts?
Jeff
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
Accepted solution
Delete will do what it says, delete the component, this can cause problems if you used the component in other features. This is where Remove is useful, Remove leaves the component in the design but hides\removes it form the timeline and browser. This can cause problems if it's a linked part though, if you edit the external linked design Fusion will tell you a component is out of date but you will need to unhide it before you can see component to do the update.
Mark.
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
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Accepted solution
Suppress is intended to temporarily remove it from memory. It can cause problems in the timeline if there are references to the suppressed items. Of course, if you unsuppress those features, the problems should resolve themselves.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Nathan Chandler
Principal Specialist
yes, @lnonnato, this is a very unfortunate side-effect of Delete in this particular workflow. If you split a body, then want to "get rid of" (generic term) one half, Remove is the only way. If you look earlier at my definition of Delete for a body, this is exactly what delete does in this case. Delete says "delete the feature which created this body". In the Split Body workflow, the Split is that feature, so Delete of one half of the body actually undoes the Split itself.
I do agree that some messaging here would be helpful, because this is a very surprising result. This confused me for a while the first time I saw it as well. We'll work on better warnings for this case.
Jeff
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
I don't think it would make much of a difference what you call it.
If you don't know what the difference is within the context of Fusion 360 it'll simply have to be explained with a few more words 😉
If you don't want to deal with a timeline, then you can switch to a direct modeling mode. In that mode, you may find the delete behavior more to your liking. In direct modeling, the concept of "remove" doesn't exist because there is no timeline.
While in timeline, the features are computed in order along the timeline. In your video, when you select the body, you'll notice that the extrude feature in your timeline is also selected.
This is because a single extrude feature was used to create 3 bodies. The extrude feature is the parent. In this scenario, when you delete the body, it is also deleting the parent extrude feature from the timeline.
If you want to remove a single body while in parametric mode, you could use two approaches:
- First, just use the remove command. This will append a Remove feature at the end of the timeline and lease the other two bodies in the workspace.
- Second, edit the extrude feature (right click on the feature in the timeline or use the select other tool from the workspace to select the extrude feature and then right click and edit). While editing the feature you can hold down Shift or Command and deselect the profile that you no longer want to extrude.
I'd point out that if you were using a multi-body approach like this in Inventor or Solidworks, the features in the browser would look very similar. With Fusion, there is the added bonus to be able to work in a direct modeling environment if that is more to your liking.
I hope that helps. I am happy to answer any other questions about delete vs. remove.
Thanks,
Nathan Chandler
Principal Specialist
@Anonymous,
If you are just looking for an answer to the question you pose in that screencast, the answer is "Remove". Select the body and choose "Remove" from the context menu.
As discussed above, for a number of reasons, we've chosen "delete" (including the delete key) to have the effect of "delete the feature that created the selected item". In your case, all 3 bodies were created by the same feature, so "delete" of one body deletes that Extrude, which deletes the other bodies as well. "Remove" will just remove that one selected body, by creating a new feature in the timeline that removes that body. I understand the confusion, but we need to support both kinds of delete. As discussed above, we'd be open to using some different labels, if that would help clear up the confusion.
Jeff
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
