Hello,
How do I remove a component from a project?
Select it and delete it from the model space. Then, in the In Model components, open the Details menu and choose Purge Unused.
You can also purge unused stuff from Model Info>Statistics which will take care of unused components and then unused materials.
you can also use the outliner, and type the component name in the filter field. then right click and erase.
If the component you want to delete has many occurrences, it would be best to edit one of them and delete its content. It will also be automatically purged.
I’m not a big fan of “purge unused” since I keep components hanging around that I may choose to reuse at a a later time. A better way, but confusing to do is to context click the item in the component browser and select delete. Pay close attention to which component you contact click because you don’t get any visual confirmation of which item you selected. Contrary to any logical reason I can think of, actually selecting the component in the browser such that it is highlighted causes the delete option to be grayed out. I can’t for the life of me understand why this hasn’t been fixed since it is one of several goofy behaviors of the component browser that has been discussed in these forums. One way of confirming if the component is being used in your model is to see if “select instances” in the context menu is greyed out. If it is, then the component is not being used and you’re probably safe to delete it. If it’s not grayed out, select instances will highlight the component in the model–which may mean that’s not the component you intend to delete.
that is not true. Select instances can be greyed out if none of the components is “selectable” in the active model. If for example the components are in a group (or sub-groups or components), the option will be greyed out, it does not necessarily mean it is not being used in the model.
You can go to statistics tab in the component browser. At the bottom, it will show how many instances are used, if there’s none it won’t show anything.
Also, if you delete a component that way that still is used, you will get a warning that all instances will be deleted.
There’s a logical reason for that. “highlighting” a component in the component browser will trigger the option of placing it in your model. Delete is then greyed out until you either place it, or hit escape to abord placing it.
Thanks for the correction on the former. I haven’t tested your exception, but don’t understand why the browser should indicate the component is not being used in the scenarios you described. That would seem to render that feature almost useless. Regarding the latter comment, I disagree that the current methodology within the browser for deleting a component is “logical”. It is confusing and breaks several common sense rules of UI design. It has confused many users and does not provide any visual feedback for the selection. That’s simply bad design. In fact the whole component browser needs an overhaul for its clumsy layout, lack of sorting features, and limited functionality.
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