CAD Forum

Hey, do any of you all use Large Design Review mode? In my job, I often need to open a large assembly to look at it, then open a subassembly of that large assembly fully resolved to study in detail or modify it. I find it needlessly inconvenient do this, so I hope I’m missing something….

If I select a face of a component in the graphics area, I can hit “open” in the small pop-up context toolbar in the graphics area and it will open the part. This is fine, but for a subassembly, I have two options.

The first is to select a face in the graphics area and use “Select subassembly” from the right-click menu. I can then click “Open in position (LDR Mode)”, and then set the newly opened subassembly to resolved.
One significant issue with this is that if I need to go “up” multiple levels, getting the menu to show up after “Select subassembly” can be tricky. After the first “Select subassembly” you have to right-click somewhere in empty space to allow a second “Select subassembly”, then you have to make sure that the mouse won’t have to travel over any components to get to the popup menu or it will disappear.

The other option is to find the subassembly in the feature tree. Usually I’m looking for a top-level subassembly, so often this is easier to find than going the graphics area route. However, when I select things in the feature tree, I don’t get the context toolbar. I also don’t see anything in the right-click menu to open the assembly. What I usually do is choose Component Properties, COPY THE FILE PATH THAT’S RIGHT THERE, and then go to File->Open and paste the filename there.

I struggled through that while we were stuck on 2022, assuming that this was a gross oversight and opening components resolved from LDR mode would be fixed, but I just installed 2024 and it’s completely unchanged. Am I missing the obvious thing that makes it easy to open subassembly components from large assembly mode?

Maybe use breadcrumbs? Not sure how LDR affects it though.

This is what I mean:

GIF below (ignore the mate errors...still working on this assembly)

Edit: So I just tested it in LDR, and breadcrumbs don't work. (I am using SW 2022) *sigh*

But they do work in lightweight. OK still looking.

josh wrote: ↑Thu Jun 13, 2024 4:13 pm ...

I struggled through that while we were stuck on 2022, assuming that this was a gross oversight and opening components resolved from LDR mode would be fixed, but I just installed 2024 and it’s completely unchanged. Am I missing the obvious thing that makes it easy to open subassembly components from large assembly mode?

So I am reading that breadcrumbs are now available in SW 2024 SP1.0. According to this video anyway.

Hey Josh, maybe this is what you're looking for

Select face, and right click and you can see the levels using the arrow next to the "open" folder.

Ugh. It has to do with toolbar settings. The available functions are DIFFERENT depending on this setting:
When this setting is checked, right-clicking on breadcrumbs gets you this:
When this setting is NOT checked, all you get is this:
Notice that the Open icons are missing.

The toolbar is also not displayed in LDR mode when left-clicking on breadcrumbs like it does when in lightweight or resolved.

I like displaying the toolbar on selection, but I prefer showing the full right-click menu because I was used to the positions of all the commands in the right-click menu before the shortcut toolbars were invented. The shortcut toolbar takes the standard commands out of the right-click menu when it's active. However, it doesn't look like the right-click menu within LDR mode contains those functions from the LDR mode shortcut toolbar. Probably a UI issue that they ain't gonna do anything about.