I am trying to help the user in this thread. He is using a linked component for two electronics assemblies, an Arduino Uno and a RasPi. The RasPi has some 600+ components, mostly passives.
As these usually are not needed I created a selection set and hid all those components. Upon breaking the link, the carefully crafted section set vanishes.
Is there an update to this half baked implementation in sight ?
"half baked"? ouch...
At the risk of sounding too much like "this is the way it's implemented, so it's correct", I will at least attempt to explain. The basic problem is: When you break an XRef link, the contents from the referenced design are "cloned" into local objects. Unfortunately, those are new items. Using the mechanism that is used to track, say, faces for joints would be more robust across this operation, but the concern was performance. It is very expensive to do this type of associative tracking, and a selection set could contain hundreds of items. So, we made a design choice to use a simpler, but less robust tracking method.
Jeff
@jeff_strater wrote:
... and a selection set could contain hundreds of items...
Right, it does. That's the whole point of selection sets when dealing with electronics stuff. And the RasPi is a relatively small board!
I usually don't recommend working with linked components. For working with Electronics boards I will change that recommendation.
Thanks for the in depth explanation!
If you do decide to throw away user work - that's what it boils down to! - then at least show a warning for linked components that do have selection sets. The reason why I broke the link was to see if it made a substantial performance difference to this assembly when I deleted the components in that selection set. I did not want to delete them form the original linked assembly, because I have to save that before it can take an effect on the assembly it's linked to and once the components are gone, they're gone 😉
As such I was immediately looking for the selection set.
If a user is not aware of that then he's up for a surprise when he wants to unhide the components. Particularly if it's several hundred!
Completely agree that this should generate a warning. I think in general we do not warn when selection set items are modified. Worth looking into. It might be a bit more than you really want, though. For instance, if you have a selection set consisting of sketch geometry, do you want a warning whenever you delete one of those items? Maybe yes, maybe no. Until now, selections sets have been pretty passive objects. But, again, worth considering, I agree.
@jeff_strater wrote:
For instance, if you have a selection set consisting of sketch geometry, do you want a warning whenever you delete one of those items?
No, I would not want a warning when I delete something that is in a selection set, but when I break the link to a linked component I'd want a warning that the selection set is deleted. For example:
"This design has a selection set, which will be deleted when the link is broken"
