Highly anticipated CONFIGURATIONS feature is useless!

[spercival985UD]

As a daily user of Fusion 360 since 2019 I was really excited to see configurations released to the public. The type of work I do would really benefit from this feature.

Credit where credit is due I think Autodesk did a really good job of implementing configurations with respect to creating, managing and changing Configurations i.e. the user experience.

So Configurations work really well in the Top Down design workflow however it is my opinion that the Top Down workflow is just not suitable for medium to complex assemblies or for professional workflows, the history bar just gets to unwieldy and component re-use is difficult. Therefore I always work bottom up wherever possible and frequently use Edit In Place to update parts. Recent Edit In Place feature updates have only now just made Bottom Up Design passable but still no way near competing CAD software's in this regard.

So this is where I noticed that configurations are not compatible with the Bottom Up workflow as its not currently possible to edit in place an external part that contains configurations. This also means it is not possible to create an assembly reference in a configured part to another part in the assembly because as far as I know this can only be done in the assembly through edit in place.

So for these reasons configurations are basically useless to me and I would imagine anybody else using the bottom up workflow typical in a professional setting.

Will it ever be possible to Edit In Place Configured parts?

Thanks

[kgrunawalt]

EIP into configuration is something that we plan to have, but that should only be an inconvenience unless you want a configuration to make top-down references to parent geometry in contexts which is not yet possible.

You say "This also means it is not possible to create an assembly reference in a configured part to another part in the assembly because as far as I know this can only be done in the assembly through edit in place."

If you mean associative references to geometry using the context of the parent assembly that was opened, you are right, but that hardly renders configurations useless.

Note that you can add child external references (xrefs) to configurations via the Configuration Design that has the table that defines the configurations. You can open the "CD" directly and add external references. These can be configured using either suppression or replacement (replacement is restricted to members of the same configuration being referenced). Adding references to an existing CD will make appropriate configuration references out-of-date. They will acquire the xrefs when updated.

[spercival985UD]

Hi,

Thank you very much for the reply - its much appreciated.

Once Fusion 360 achieves parity in terms of functionality accessible through Edit in Place or opening the part directly it will be a very difficult CAD software to beat!

Its good to know that EIP into configured parts is planned to be implemented. Is there a time frame for this?

Kind regards