Reliable way to copy and paste sketches for portability
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This thread explains a good way to copy and paste sketches between documents. However I have found there are a few more steps needed to make this a reliable procedure that produces clean, portable results.
Sketches are tricky to copy and paste because, if constrained (as they should be), they create dependencies that may be non-obvious and which may propagate in a way that breaks component portability. Also there are minor "bugs" in F360, one of which causes the "paste" option to not appear within a sketch when it should, as the above-referenced thread explains.
So, for completeness, as far as I can take it at this time, let me explain all the sketch copy/paste steps in one list, including a few additional steps I've identified, to make copying and pasting sketches reliable and straightforward, at least until the F360 dev team can catch up and streamline this workflow in future.
Sketch Copy/Paste Workflow as of August 2016:
1/ Open sketch you wish to copy.
2/ (New) Make sure your sketch's constraints do not refer to any system parameter other than those defined within the sketch itself. Do this by hovering the pointer over each constraint in the sketch and looking at its identifier and the identifier's value or reference. Any referenced parameters seen here (the text after the colon) must be from a constraint that already exists within the sketch, or must be a user-defined parameter. In other words your sketch items to be copied must either be entirely self-contained or must refer to a user parameters, and must never refer to constraints from another sketch! Re-reference your constraints internally as required (Critical if you want future component portability!)
3/ Select the sketch elements you wish to copy, including any desired constraints, issue the copy command, close the sketch.
4/ Open or create a component you wish to copy your sketch elements into. Component can be in current or another document. ACTIVATE this component!
5/ If destination sketch already exists, edit the sketch, select an object in the sketch, the origin point works well, and select paste command. Again (bug!): Paste command will not appear unless something is selected in the sketch.
6/ (New) If you want to paste into a NEW sketch, then there is an extra step. After copying your sketch elements, create or select your destination component, activate it, then issue the "create sketch" command, then STOP the sketch! Now edit the sketch. This step creates an origin point that you can then select in order to activate the paste command (the bug again). When you create a new sketch to paste into, there is initially nothing to select to get around the paste bug! so you can't paste no matter what. Alternatively, after you "create sketch" you can insert or build an object first, then select that to activate the paste command.
7/ (New) Now CHECK AGAIN every constraint that you have copied and pasted in to ensure none of them refer to the copied sketch's constraints. If you do not do this you will likely propagate obscure dependencies to the original sketch within your pasted sketch that will impair future portability of your destination sketch/object/component.
