Unable to delete a previously linked design

[Anonymous]

After inserting a design and then breaking the link on the inserted design, the original design can't be moved or deleted from the project folder:

After all the links are broken, I would expect the design to become independent again, like before it was referenced. The linked design feature is fantastic, but it's not always needed ( option to disable? ), and clearly, there has to be a better way of handling broken refs.

[charegb]

Hi,

This is currently as designed but we are gathering feedback on how people would expect it to work.

Fusion 360 maintains all versions of the design in the cloud and you can easily promote an older version to be the latest version incase you don't like some of your recent changes. Now if you referenced Part1 in v2 of an assembly but broke the link in v3, we still need to keep part1 around incase you promote v2 back to top. The idea basically being that you should never get in a file resolution error situation.

Thanks,

Bankim

[Anonymous]

Thanks @charegb. I think an option to break all links and either keep the model or delete it would be convenient, as well as an option to disable linking altogether.

[Anonymous]

As a user, I want the ability to decouple designs and have the freedom to choose whether the decoupling should be tertiary, and only affect the current context, or permanent, and affect all previous versions of the context. If I choose permanent, I then want the freedom to delete/move the decoupled design. I would love to hear some constructive feedback from the team on how this might be implemented.

[Anonymous]

Proposed solution:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation-request-a/decoupling-referenced-files/idi-p/583...

F360 team. If you are working on a solution for this, please get it out in the open where the people who will have to live with it every day can get involved.

[KennethOfLeesburg]

A related issue is just figuring out which designs are holding a link to a given design.  If a template part is linked in dozens of different designs, and for some reason that part needs to go away (e.g., an employee quits and his parts get moved to a centralized library, or two people used the same name for different parts, or low level management just wants to organize a large collection of designs), it may become very hard to figure out who is holding the old design hostage.

I can't delete it because someone is using it, probably in an old version (just to add to the confusion), but I can't figure out who is using it.

[TrippyLighting]

For larger distributed design I would recommend to break Links once a product is in production soon  as built state can be documented. But of course that doesn't  help in this situation.

The data panel where the design a click on the version number expand the panel for that design.

The "used in" tab then lists all these designs the current file is linked to.

In the panel above if you click on View detail on web there is an alternative view on the same info:

Then you know what design it is used in.

If you want to remove this part from that design that's a problem. You can open that design and delete the linked part and then save that design. The problem is that the linked part is still linked to the previous version. there;'s a workaround for this but it'll completely trip any versions from the design your "library part" was deleted from.