Decoupling Referenced Files

[nallenscott]

After inserting a file into another design, I want the ability to decouple the referenced design and have the freedom to choose whether the decoupling should only affect the current version of the parent (leaving historical references intact), or permanent, and affect all previous versions as well (zap referenced design from parent history). If I choose permanent, I then want the freedom to delete / move the decoupled data file.

[wmgeorge64]

A choice when Deleting, do you want to delete all links to the Inserted file?

[charegb]

Hi @nallenscott

Are you looking for a way to freely restructure your data even if it has historical references?

We intend to allow this soon when we support cross project distributed designs. Would that solve the need?

I don't agree that we should be zapping anything from history. We just need better ability to reorganize data in the current state.

Thanks,

Bankim

[nallenscott]

@charegb What happens to designs that contain historical references, but are no longer needed? Can the design be deleted if it is no longer being referenced in the current state? If data is no longer useful, it should be possible to delete it. You could even make the delete superficial so that the data no longer appears to the user, and maintain it on the backend for historical purposes.

Cross-project distribution is great news - less copy bloat, the possibility of projects as reusable libraries, etc. - but it has to be possible to delete data. I agree that zapping historical references is a bad idea, but when data becomes unneeded/unwanted, it should be possible to delete it. Again, make the delete superficial so that it can be brought back later in an earlier version of another design.

[charegb]

Completely agree Scott. Delete with a recycle bin is part of the solution here.
I don’t want to comment on dates because we have been more delayed on Delete/Recycle bin than anything else but we are working on it ☺

Thanks,
Bankim

[charegb]

Completely agree Scott. Delete with a recycle bin is part of the solution here.
I don’t want to comment on dates because we have been more delayed on Delete/Recycle bin than anything else but we are working on it ☺

Thanks,
Bankim

[nallenscott]

@charegb Great! Thanks for the update. Looking forward to it.

[michaelZNCUN]

Please make it possible to delete or at least move all old files to a recycle type bin. I have multiple folders that make a mess of my files called "OLD files" just to get rid of a bunch of files and unclutter my work space. 

Sometimes a file is imported, doesn't work and are immediately deleted. But If I didn't do this process correctly the files end up being ghosts that I cannot delete because they are still linked to other files that I need.

Is it possible to create a break link option on the parent file so that you don't have to find all of the child locations for break a file. You could have a list of all child files that we agree to break links to if that seemed safer.

[CruftMeister]

I have to agree, the current file system in Fusion makes it incredibly difficult to delete files that have historical links.  I only recently discovered this but was floored when I realized how bad it was.

By way of example, I recently pulled a STEP file of an interim PCBA we are using into Fusion.  I then experimented by inserting that PCBA into a handful of assemblies.  Soon after I uploaded a newer version of the PCBA and went to delete the old interim version ( this is a standard workflow for product development)  but couldn't because Fusion squawked that it still had links.

There are a few issues I uncovered at play here.  The first is that the "Used In" mechanism is limited to a single rev at a time.  So if you have a file with a number of revs, you have to walk through each rev in Fusion or A360 and manually check each link.  This is really bad if you have a lot of revs in a linked file, but even once you find the links, the rest of the workflow actually gets worse.

In my example case, upon finding the old rev of an assembly where I used this interim PCBA, there is no way to delete the reference short of downloading the assembly file that references the ref'ed file, blowing away the ref'ed file and then uploading the assembly file that referenced back into Fusion.

I don't think this workflow is reasonable, so glad to hear there is a fix in the works via Delete/Recycle.  As bad as it is in my project, I think it becomes totally unmanageable in a short period of time if you have more thane user in a project.  I'm the only person working on my projects in Fusion, if I had multiple contributors, this would quickly spiral into weeks of work to untangle file references to be able to clean up working directories.

A long term fix as described above is great, but I think the "Used In" view needs to also be fixed so that it can report to the user file linkages for all Revs of the file, as it is it is painful for more than a few Rev's worth.