Component Deletion Warning : About what?

[RogerInHawaii]

There are times when I select to delete a component and I get the warning messages, "This feature is referenced by other features in the timeline. Are you sure you want to delete?", and it's not at all clear to me what other features it's referencing.

My very first reaction to that message is, "Well, WHAT features are referenced?" How do I make an informed decision as to whether or not to proceed with the deletion if I don't know what features may be impacted and what impacts those might be? It would be so very helpful if that warning message came with an option to somehow highlight or list those potentially affected features.

But the most recent occurrence of that message popped up when I was deleting a Component that I had just previously made. It was positioned at the very end of the timeline. I added it to test out some things and when I was done creating it I wanted to simply delete it. I didn't need it anymore. So I selected it and hit the Delete button and got that same deletion warning message:

But there is absolutely  nothing AFTER the component within the timeline. There is nothing BEFORE the component that makes reference to it. In fact, I cannot conceive of how anything anywhere in a timeline can reference something LATER in the timeline. So that can't be the problem I'm being warned about. The only thing I can think of that the warning is referencing is the fact that at the point in the timeline where I CREATED the new Component there are edits made TO the component that (naturally) occur AFTER the creation.

And it appears that the warning is about those edits made directly TO the component itself. But I'm deleting the entire component, including any edits (like creating sketches, using those sketches, doing copy/pastes from other components, etc.). All of that will get deleted when the selected Component is deleted, so why is there a warning? Is the algorithm that checks for later-in-the-timeline back-references not intelligent enough to recognize the ones that will get deleted along with the deletion of the Component itself, i.e. those completely contained WITHIN the Component to be deleted?

Deletion warnings are great, very useful. I'm glad they exist. But warning about this kind of situation, where there really isn't an issue, are just confusing to the user.

[RogerInHawaii]

I came across another situation very similar to the one above. In this case I have explicitly selected two adjacent items in the timeline.

The first (left) one is a copy/paste of an object and the second one, immediately following it, is a Joint operation to position that just-pasted object. I've selected BOTH of those items in the timeline and hit the Delete button and I, once again, get the Deletion warning about "other features" in the timeline that reference the deleted operations. It's pretty clear, since there is absolutely NOTHING in the timeline beyond the two items that I'm deleting, that the warning is that the deletion of the FIRST item will impact on the subsequent item. But since I'm deleting BOTH of them there is really no negative impact. The fact that the second item to be deleted references the first item to be deleted is irrelevant and doesn't warrant and warning message, since both will be gone once the deletion occurs.

The detection of deletion conflicts with items further down the timeline needs enhancement so that it doesn't detect and warn about irrelevant back-references. I would think that all it needs to do is have a list of all the items that are about to be deleted, and when it's sequencing through them and detects that there might be one further down the timeline that might cause a back-reference error, check to see if that further-down-the-timeline item is ALSO going to be deleted, and if it is, then there's actually no problem.