Open part/assy related drawing

[Mika]

Topic is the question already. Is there any command in part/assy to open that related drawing? That no need to go on the folders to scroll the right one…

 

[HaroldL]

No, but there should be, especially if you click on Make drawing of this design it should warn if a drawing exists and ask if you want to open it or make a new one.

 

[DavidJ]

But a part or assembly may appear in multiple drawings.... This is more complex than it first appears.

 

[simonb65]

Is there any command in part/assy to open that related drawing?

From the title of the topic, you're assuming that part to drawing is a one-to-one relationship. I have drawings of parts, and the same single part is in a sub-assembly drawing and that part is also buried in the product assembly drawing! That part is also used in other products, which have their own drawings. You can't easily have one-to-many relationships in both up and down hierarchical directions without a very complex document management or database driven system to manage it. Alibre document dependency is hierarchal and a top down system ... and look at the issues people constantly have with copying/duplicating files outside Alibre and breaking things! Imagine the nightmare of keeping multiple bi-directional references 100% reliable and how do you propagate any changes across, up and down that hierarchal structure?

It's far easier for you to create, manage and follow your own project file structure process, than to hope an application will be powerful and flexible enough to manage everybody's unique processes. That kind of management software, in it's own right, is very big bucks software!

 

[NateLiquidGravity]

ZDB Launcher is a free software that indexes Alibre files into a database and let's you find connected files like drawings. It's not a perfect solution to the problem but very helpful.

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[HaroldL]

It's been a while but I recall that in SolidWorks you could RMB click on the part name in the Feature Explorer and select Open Drawing and if the part had a drawing you could open the part drawing. It was the same for assemblies. But to find all the drawings where the part was use was another matter, that's were Enovia PLM was useful.

 

[Mika]

It's been a while but I recall that in SolidWorks you could RMB click on the part name in the Feature Explorer and select Open Drawing and if the part had a drawing you could open the part drawing. It was the same for assemblies. But to find all the drawings where the part was use was another matter, that's were Enovia PLM was useful.

That same thing I was trying to do, while I had part/assy open on Alibre. RMB and open Drw…it wont be complicated and mixed, if part/sub-assy is used in many assemblies. Just open that part/assy drw what I have currently open on my screen.

 

[DavidJ]

I'm working on a project now; one drawing of an assembly has many parts hidden, and a single view (to check some details with customer), another drawing of the same assembly shows different views, and doesn't have any parts hidden. That's 2 drawings of the same assembly (neither drawing uses the default name).

There is also the basic problem mentioned by Simon above - one way relationships can't be read in the reverse direction - a 2D drawing knows which part(s) it contains views of, but those parts don't carry information about which drawing(s) they are shown in. A database of some sort is needed to manage such things.