Part II: Building Intelligence into Your Parts
Part II: Building Intelligence into Your Parts
Best Practice
Before deleting sketch entities, try to understand what types of relationships the change will affect downstream.
Be sure to consider other sketch relationships within the current part, mates, and in-context relations in
the assembly, and things of this nature. In fact, it is best to have all of this in mind when you are creating
relationships to begin with. Try to make relations to the most stable entities available, which usually means
having sketches and reference geometry entities as high up in the tree as possible. n
Display/Delete Relations
Display/Delete Relations is your primary tool when dealing with sketch relations. It is particularly
useful for sorting relations by the various categories shown in Figure 6.1. The capability to show
sketch relations in the graphics window is nice, but sorting them in a list according to their state,
with the capability to delete all in any particular state, is very useful.
FIGURE 6.1The Display/Delete Relations PropertyManager
Sketch relations in the Display/Delete Relations dialog box can be divided into the following
categories:l All in this sketch. Shows all the relations in the active sketch.l (^) Dangling. Shows only the dangling relations. Dangling relations appear in a brownish-green
or olive color, and represent relations that have lost one of the entities that drives the
relation. You can repair dangling relations by selecting the entity with the dangling relation,
and then dragging the red dot onto the entity to which it should have the relation.
l (^) Overdefining/Not Solved. Overdefined relations are any set of conflicting or redundant
instructions that are given to a sketch entity, and appear in red. For example, if a line is
collinear with an edge and vertical, but the edge itself is not vertical, then both the collin-
ear and vertical relations appear in red.