Does anyone know of a way to change the default behavior of making a copy of a component to create it as “unique” so you don’t have to “make unique” prior to editing it? It would be equally helpful to create a duplicate copy at times and make a unique copy at other times.
Make a group instead of a component in the first place.
A keyboard shortcut for Make Unique can be useful.
I am curious how that will affect the report generator reports I have created. There is no Model Attribute in the report generator for ‘Group’. I could use Tags though.
It has messed me up in the past, copying a component, forgetting to make it unique, editing it, and inadvertently changing it everywhere else in the design I used it.
Creating everything as a group is different for me. I suppose I could convert a group to a component as long as I remember that subsequent copies it will be a duplicate rather than unique. I can see problems with some of the parts of a drawing being groups and others being components. It wouldn’t be obvious which is which from looking at the screen.
It sounds like it’s currently not an option to be able to select default between unique and duplicate when making a copy.
I guess it would have been helpful if you’d explained that in the first place.
No. There are no attribute options for groups like there are for components.
I think a training issue. I use components exclusively in my models and don’t have a problem with that sort of thing. If I know the copy needs to be made different immediately after copying I immediately hit the keyboard shortcut for Make Unique. In other cases I want them to remain instances of the same component at least for some part of the process. They only get split out when they have to.
What are you modeling?
There isn’t a native way to make components unique automatically. Maybe you could write a Ruby script that combines Copy and Make Unique into a single command.
Thanks for your help. I think about the Ruby script. I model everything from single component parts to entire houses.
What I just discovered by creating things as groups is that a new part can be made into a group while touching another groped part. This is not the case for components. The new part has to be separated from another component to make it a new component. (at least that’s what I have found).
Actually that’s not true. The component will get made but if you want the component to replace the selected geometry, you have to tick the box for that in the Create Component window. After you do that the first time that option will be remembered.
Nice. I didn’t know that.
If you use profile builder to draw you will probably be able to obtain unique components while you are drawing.
The is an Edit Flag extension designed specifically to warn you if you are editing a non unique component.
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