Is there a way to select parts in an assembly and add them to a view?

[Anonymous]

I am trying to make logical views of subsets of parts in an assembly, and keep finding the process to be very inefficient.

Say you start with all parts visible, and create a new view. A small subset of parts is needed in this view, but is seems you are forced to make invisible all of the parts you don't want in the view. The compliment of this is often what you want -- remove unselected parts from the current view. 

One alternative is to make all invisible, and then select from the browser and turn on the desired parts. This assumes the order in the browser is appropriate (so you can do a range), and it requires part names  that allow you to pick what is needed. But the name may not be clear in terms of where the part is located.

So you end up with a reasonable view, but some parts were left out. How do you get them in the view? If you can't do it by browser name then you must restore  a view that has more parts. Now you can see the needed part, but you can't say add the selected part to the less comprehensive view. You can find it in the browser (and have it selected), but if you restore the target view the selection state is removed, so you are forced to remember the part name, find it in the browser, and change its visibility. With more than a few parts to do this for blood pressure tends to rise towards dangerous levels as you flip between two views and hunt and peck in the browser.

Please tell me if I am missing some feature that makes this job easier!

One feature I can imagine that could be very useful here (and other scenarios) is the concept of a "selection set".  A selection set would be a named set of parts in an assembly. This object when include  operations like:

1. Select (or unselect) the members. This would allow the operation to be the normal set combinations like union and difference. The members then light up in the browser and the graphic.
2. Set operations could be done on named sets to produce logically related other named sets.
3. Add or remove the set members from a view.
4. Any other operation on a single object that also makes sense to perform on a collection of objects, like delete.

[PaulMunford]

Would the selection filters help?

In the QAT, green symbol that looks like an assembly - or SHIFT+RMB in the graphics window.

You will find options like:
Select in camera.
Select visible
Select by bounding box
Invert current selection
Etc

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the "Invert Selection" option -- missed that in the menu. At least we have the "not" operator...

However it still seems true that named selections with the standard set operations to create others sets is easy to program, it does not need to break any existing behavior, and is quite powerful in what it adds.

Is this worth posting as an idea? Obviously there needs to be user weight behind any idea that has more than a double precision round off error chance of being implemented.

[jtylerbc]

You'll probably never know whether there is user weight behind the feature or not without posting it as an Idea.

One option you could consider is using folders in your assembly Browser, if you aren't already.  This doesn't necessarily serve the same purpose as a saved Selection Set, but the additional organization will help make finding items in the Browser a little easier.

[Anonymous]

In addition to folders, I did find reordering items in the browser quite helpful in putting related parts together to allow range selections. In this case all components were multi-body derived and grounded. I was concerned that in general arbitrary reordering may not be valid -- can a component in an assembly come before a component that it depends on?

Also, with a sub-assembly of sub-assemblies it definitely seems there is a problem moving parts arbitrarily. I expected this operation to flat out be rejected, but inventor gave me a long warning that I could not understand, and so chickened out ant hit CANCEL.

Your suggestion did raise another way to thinking about selection sets. Instead, let a view define a logical browser tree of parts, including folders to make the logical view hierarchical. This ordering would not change the actual physical ordering of parts in the assembly, so mixing parts across sub-assemblies in the logical view would raise no issues at all. The browser would offer the option to include invisible parts in the browser tree, making it easy to fine tune visibility, but also allow invisible parts to be removed making the browser view much cleaner in a narrow view.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

One little known feature that could mean a lot is to right-click on the view in the browser window and  choose "Edit Include Components". (can't do it in locked views or in master view, which is locked by default). Once you are in this command you have different "view" options. Most of the time I want to add items so I set it to "show excluded components". Now you can use all the selection tools you want : normal dragging for all inside the bounding box, reversed dragging for all covered by the box, etc. Click OK and you have your custom view without any look at the browser section.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymouswrote:

One little known feature that could mean a lot is to right-click on the view in the browser window and  choose "Edit Include Components".

 Hiding in plain sight -- if I had any I would send you a bitcoin for this!

[SBix26]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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@Anonymouswrote:

One little known feature that could mean a lot is to right-click on the view in the browser window and  choose "Edit Include Components".

 Hiding in plain sight -- if I had any I would send you a bitcoin for this!

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... and here's what it looks like in 2019:

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Sam B
Inventor Pro 2019.0.0 | Windows 7 SP1
LinkedIn

[Anonymous]

Hanafey,

Any other coin will do, I'm not that picky 🙂