Demote or Promote Components

[TheCADWhisperer]

Is it possible to Demote an assembly Component to a sub-assembly or Promote a Component from a sub-assembly to the top level assembly?

I do this all the time in Autodesk Inventor (can also drag and drop between assemblies and sub-assemblies in Inventor - which sort of acts like it is going to work in Fusion (which sort of acts like it is going to work (blue bar) similar to Inventor drag and drop....

But then doesn't work when I release.

The only work-around I have found is to make the Sub active and then copy the component and then go back and delete the original.

[jhackney1972 · Accepted solution]

I do the Inventor operation "Demote" and "Promote" in Fusion 360 quite often.  In my Screencast I demonstrate it.  There are times when it will fail such as when components have dependencies and Linked Components will give you issues as well.  But in a clean no frills assemble - sub-assembly environment, it works well.  

The blue line your refer too makes you believe you can do it, or at least rearrange components but no dice.  You have to drag and drop the components on top of the top level name or the sub-assembly names to get it to work.

[GRSnyder]

Another thing to keep in mind is that you must usually be at the end of the timeline to move components around. Fusion 360 won't give you any indication or reminder of this - it'll just refuse to move anything.

[TrippyLighting]

I find this one of the more frustrating parts of Fusion 360.

If you do actually do this at the end of the timeline and then continue editing and adding stuff, which invariably involves moving the timeline marker to a particular position, at some point in time you'll get the following warning:

"Cannot move marker before active component" 

Of course one would want to continue working in the new, optimized structure,  but if you roll back the timeline marker to make an edit that new structure is undone and reverts to the old one. In larger assemblies, it is easy to get lost.

The troublemaker here is not the relations between components, but the joints, which are timeline entries. My other  CAD workhorse has a component-specific timeline and relations/references between different component objects are possible just as in Fusion 360, but based on customer feedback at some point they decided to make mates not timeline entries and now one can re-structure the browser tree just as easily as one can in Fusion 360's direct modeling mode.

Of curse for Fuoisn 360 that would mean that joints and their position in the timeline could not be used as modeling tools. It would be nice to have a choice!