Rebuilding... Over & over &over &over...

Yes,.. circular referances can cause this. It's not very hard to create them unknowingly when designing molds.

Try suppressing things until it goes away. Then work through the responsible part, or sub assembly untill you find it.

Regards

Mark

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com (oredock13) wrote in news:8c3db6ca.0402221930.4db2d9d4 @posting.google.com:

Yeah, circular references are easy to create. The only way to find a circular reference that I know of is to RMB on each part in the assembly and "List External Reference". Then write down the part that is doing the referencing in one column and the part being referenced in another column. If you go through all of the parts and find parts that are in both columns, and can see a loop like A-B-C-A, you've got yourself a circular reference,

There are a couple ways to avoid circular references. One is to use an assembly layout sketch and only reference that with other parts. Another way is to keep your references going up the assembly tree. You'll need to put the most driving parts in at the top of the tree to do this. If you avoid making references going down the tree, then you'll avoid circular refs.

good luck,

matt

Sounds like in your options you have backup set to every one rebuild. Because adding a mate, or any of those things you mentioned are done it rebuilds which in turn would make it rebuild

Neil

oredock13 wrote:

Having Animator Screen Capture on would do this.

cadML tools

can document your model with graphs that show all mates, references and even equations. It should help you a lot to find circular refs.

I found it, it was indeed a circular reference. After alot of right clicking , rebuilding, and waiting, all of a sudden some 5 or six errors appeared. That made it pretty obvious where my problem was. I wish the errors would have appeared sooner.

Thanks to all who posted. Now I have a few more tricks up my sleeve next time this happens.

I downloaded cadML, looks looks like a usefull tool. I'll check it out as soon as I get a little time.

Sounds to me like we should all send in an Enchancement Request to add another dialog pop-up (DOH!) to warn you that you are adding a circular reference. Or maybe a simple symbol, sorta like how the lightweight feather appears in the feature manager and on screen, to identify which parts or assemblies have a circular reference.

Good idea (I had it before ;-) but quite hard to implement because:

1) not only references between parts, but also feature dependencies and equations, and even mates might cause circular dependencies 2) cycle detection in graphs isn't trivial. It's simpler if you have the graph stored in memory as a "minimum spanning graph", which is not useful for other purposes (or perhaps to optimize multi processor usage in rebuilds...) But if you have to rebuild the graph every time you add a feature, it will take too long. 3) sometimes you'd want circular references. See the nice models from Mike J Wilson which animate at each rebuild...

Check

for tools that let you display dependencies graphs of your SW models. You're free to add a cycle detection algorithm (or to pay me to do it ;-)

I haven't downloaded the app yet, but it sounds like what I've been asking for. It takes me at least an hour to do an analysis on a 30-40 part assembly to find all the relations.

Would it be any faster if you just stored the information in text format instead of graphically? I mean all you need is the name of the part or assembly level feature being referenced.

I submitted an enhancement request to SW for this last year when I had to prove to a customer that he had created his own problem. By deleting a couple relationships we took his rebuild time from 20 minutes to 30 seconds.

matt

"Philippe Guglielmetti" wrote in news:403a3156$0$716$ snipped-for-privacy@news.sunrise.ch:

get cadML. It's (still) free. Tell me how you like it, I'm still working hard on it.

Actually cadML is a text (XML) format. The graph is an automatic representation of ALL the dependencies (not only external references) because "a drawing is worth a thousand words". Consider that circular references might be "indirect" through feature references, equations and even mates! But if you want the references to be listed somewhere, it's a matter of seconds to modify the cadHTML.xslt sheet to do that.

Wow! Yes, it would be great to have a circular ref detection tool, but it's definitely not easy. I'd be happy to get subcontracted by SW on this topic ;-)

A circular referance warning would have been great but if it is hard to implement, what do people think of the following: - A toggle 'button' icon that is apparent when people are working with assemblies and have a part open ('pinked') for editing.

Using this button would restrict you to only selecting edges, faces mates etc of the current 'editable' part in the assembly. This would really be useful and would possibly reduce the amount of times I have inadvertantly selected edges,etc belonging to other parts in an assembly.

I expect someone is going to say that this can already be done! or there is a hotkey for this. I do hope so, but I have lost my track of all the new stuff they keeping putting into SW!! I am still getting to grips with the new 'User manual' . I'm using SW2004 sp2.1

Regards

Jonathan Stedman

jjs wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I'd like to take it a step further. Of all possible selections from a mouse pick, let SW make selected the entity most in line with best practices. Let it always prefer the edge of a local part. Let it always prefer the sketch driving the edge. Let it always prefer the plane a face's feature was sketched on. Etc.

It might be easier to implement a "heads-up" popup list of possible selections when the user selects "select other".

Off to the ER page....