Making Sense of Onshape File Structure

This video is designed to help orient you to the way Onshape deals with files

and file structure

and I'm not going to say that this is

the way Onshape would want me to describe this video.

It may or may not be.

I'm simply going to tell you what's worked for me

and it's helped me

make sense of this

environment.

OK,

first thing you should know is that from a technical perspective there are no files

in Onshape.

Everything

is in the Cloud.

It is a web native

piece of software.

It is just

out there like Google Docs for example,

doesn't have files.

It's just out there in the Cloud. So, we have the same thing going on here,

but that can get quite complicated to wrap your arms around

if you're trying to

keep track of a project that has a bunch of parts

or get an assembly together that's referencing a bunch of parts.

So, the question is how does Onshape deal with that?

I'm gonna just give you some orientation

for how to deal with that right now and refer you to the learning center

for

Onshape for any sort of additional help that you may

need.

All right,

first thing you should see here is I am

in Onshape basic account.

First thing you need to know is that there

are two types of accounts that you might encounter.

One is

the personal account,

which is what we are seeing right now.

This is CAM Mattson personal account,

and we know it's our personal account

because

it has the Onshape logo up here at the top.

Now,

if I jump into

this particular account,

this is what you're going to see basically. The first time you get in there,

you will see that you have

no documents,

no publications,

no folders or anything like that

owned by you.

And it'll be blank and the question will be like,

"Well,

how do you start creating anything?"

All right,

well,

the first thing we do is to come up here to the Create button

and we're going to click on it and we're going to create

a document.

Now

Test

1,

we're gonna just gonna call this Test 1.

I like to think of documents and documents have not

failed me when I think of it this way.

I like to think of a document as a top level folder.

It's gonna contain a bunch of stuff in that

document.

Right now, I'm in Test 1 document and it shows right here

that I am in

that document. Onshape's official word for this is document,

so I'm in the Test 1 document.

I like to think of it as a folder like a super

class folder,

OK?

Now in my

document, I have a number of things that Onshape called Studios.

I have a Part Studio, in this case, you can

see down here. And I also have an Assembly Studio.

I can actually just add anything I want.

I can create new part studios

and now I have two part studios

in this document.

So, now think of this as like a super folder,

like a top level folder.

I now have 2

part studios in there and one assembly studio.

Now in a Part Studio,

this is where I would have,

so I'm going here to Part Studio number 1.

This is where I have the traditional CAD environment.

If I start making shapes in this space,

they

are being saved in Part Studio 1

of

the document called Test 1.

Now within a part studio,

generally it's a good idea to have one part kind of per

part studio,

but I can actually create multiple parts

in one part studio if I want to.

And so, in a way we can think of a part studio

as also being like a folder that contains a bunch of things.

It contains parts.

And here we can see in this part is the Parts List.

And I have 0 parts here because I haven't made anything.

In just a minute I'm gonna show you what

this looks like with a system that's actually been

designed out but I'm trying to help you see the structure

at this point.

So, within this document that's called Test 1,

I have multiple part studios

and I have one assembly studio.

Once I'm in the Assembly Studio,

I draw

parts from the Part Studio

to create my assembly.

Now

within this particular environment which we can think of is like this

document test 1

environment,

I can do all kinds of things.

I can add folders.

I can create a brand new folder and I can call it

Part Studios.

I can call it whatever I want,

Part Studios.

And I can move my part studios into the Part Studio folder.

And I can now have a set of part studios,

and I

have,

excuse me,

I have a subset of my whole document that's called Part Studios,

and I can click into the Part Studios and see Part Studio 1 and Part Studio 2.

I can rearrange these, however, I want to rearrange them.

I can hit the home button to go back

to the top level of my

of my Test 1 document.

Here I'm back to seeing Part Studios and Assembly 1.

I generally like to have a folder of Part Studios,

a folder of Assembly Studios,

a folder of

drawings,

which I also tend to call Drawing Studios,

even though there isn't,

I think a thing called Drawing Studios,

but Drawing Studios.

And then

later we'll learn about Render Studios and stuff like that.

So, we can see then that our document, our Onshape document is like

a folder

that has a bunch of stuff in it and we can have

subfolders in there and then we can ultimately have parts and assemblies

that are embedded in the Part Studios

and in the Assembly

Studios.

All right,

now once this structure is

sort of

in place and starts to get more complicated and harder to understand,

we can use this little button that's right over here

which is called the Tab manager

and this allows us to see

the file structure in a more traditional file structure kind of way.

So, I have

in this document that's called Test 1.

I have my Part Studios folder and I have my Assembly Studios folder,

which I also see as tabs down here,

but I can also open up this Part Studios folder and see that

I have Part Studio 1 and I also have Part Studio 2.

Now one of the beauties of this is

that

within

this

environment that we're working in this sort of

like web native environment that's called Onshape,

we can add in all kinds of things here.

I can import images,

which can be sets of drawings or figures or other things,

and I can have them in here

to help me as reference

as I'm going through this, and I tend to do that a lot with engineering drawings.

I like to bring in

an engineering drawing and then reference it.

Or a set of instructions,

bring it in as a PDF

and then reference it.

Now,

if

we had,

if

this was an actual non-

web native CAD software,

we would be thinking all the time about how do we save

our documents.

Saving is so important. We don't want to lose any of our critical work.

The way that that's done in Onshape

is that versions and histories are tagged

and bookmarked basically, so we can go back to them

at any time

and that's done through

the versions and histories tab.

And I have no version that has been

saved on top of the initial one

which was started right here and it's called 'Main,'

but if I wanted to have yet a new

saved version of what we've done so far,

which is we haven't really done anything except made some folders and stuff,

I can create a new version,

call it something,

you know,

Version 2

and save it and now I have Version 2 snapshotted here,

snapshot of it at 6:28,

and then this is my main one that I'm working on now.

I can go back to Version 2

any time.

So, we can for example go back to start,

which was 6:22,

and when we go back to start, we can see what things were like

at the very beginning.

I only had one part studio and one assembly.

I didn't have any Part Studio 2 or folder

called Part Studios,

that's what things looked like at 622.

If I click into this one,

I can see what things look like at 6:28.

I have a Part Studios folder

now,

and I have Assembly 1,

I can go into that Part Studios folder and I see that there are two part studios.

So, this is the basic structure of how Onshape deals with

file structure

under the understanding that there are not actually any files,

but luckily Onshape has allowed us

to think

in terms of file structure a bit

and has given us

these kinds of things that I've just described to you

that's the basic layout of this.

I want to show you now what this looks like

for a system that has been sort of designed out

OK?

Alright,

so I need to get back in here,

so give me a second to do that.

OK.

I mentioned at the beginning that there are two sort

of accounts that you might be able to work in

or

you might find yourself

dealing with,

right?

One of them is this personal

account which shows an Onshape logo right up here,

but if you are part of an enterprise and get into an enterprise account,

then you would switch to your enterprise account right over here,

and as you switch to your enterprise account

you will then be able to,

I gotta get into my enterprise account now,

you

would be able to

see a variety of other things including

the work of other individuals in the enterprise.

For example,

I'm seeing not only the things that I created

like this engine right here,

but also the Shampoo Top by Odie

or the motor drawing by Thomas,

and

so on,

OK.

And

so, what am I trying to show you here?

I'm actually trying to demonstrate at this point what

this looks like

for objects

that have been designed out already and are pretty complex,

what the structure looks like.

OK,

so for this particular object,

which is the NES game controller,

you

can,

we're gonna see a couple of things.

I'm gonna come down here. We should first notice that we're looking at

a thing called the NES document which remember is like a super folder,

OK,

now

it turns out in Onshape you can work across super folders,

but I think it gets more complicated to do that right

now, we just need to think of a super folder as holding

an entire project.

It's like a project folder.

This is like the NES

Project Folder,

OK?

And it's defined right up here,

OK?

Now,

in this,

I've got a lot of things going on.

If I go to my home tab,

I can see that I have

Assembly Studios,

folder,

Part Studios folder,

a Drawings folder and a Decals folder.

All right,

well,

what do I have in my part studios folder?

I've got a lot of things.

I've got the main PCB,

the A/B button,

the top cover.

You can see if I hover on these,

it basically shows me them,

which is kind of nice,

and I got a bunch of other parts.

I can open up any one of these parts and realize that

this is now just like working in a regular CAD system,

but all of my D-pad

files

are in

this Part Studio,

which are part of

my folders called Part Studios folders,

which are then part of the NES document,

which is like a top-level

folder.

Now, I mentioned that there are no files,

but it does turn out that if I want to

3D print this for example,

I would want to have the files and where would I get those?

If I right click on this D-Pad, I can export this out

to an STL,

for example,

so that I can put it into my

slicer and create

a model that's ready for 3D printing,

right?

I can also

export this as

other

formats,

even for example,

SolidWorks format

that will allow me to export something that looks more like a traditional CAD file.

I am convinced though that once you learn how to use

Onshape and the saving and the other things like this,

you won't want a CAD file in the traditional sense.

You will simply want to be able to manage the cloud data

in a good way.

So,

while there are no files,

we can actually export

just like we could do in Google Docs,

we could export something as a Word doc or as a PDF or something like that.

We can do that same

kind of thing

here.

OK,

now

in

this particular Part Studio,

which is the D-Pad part studio,

you can see there's one part,

and I mentioned that it's a good idea

to put

basically just one part in a Part Studio unless there's a good reason

to have multiple parts

in a Part Studio.

So, if I go over here for example to this S/S button,

which is the start/select button for the

NES

game controller,

this one has two parts in it.

It has the S/S button

and it has the contact pill,

and the contact pill is this black

piece that we see right here.

This was modeled together in the same part studio because I wanted

to build this

circular extrusion

based on geometry that exists in this other part that's over here.

There's strategies and reasons for doing that and when we do,

it's OK. When we have a good strategy,

it's OK to have

more than one part in a Part Studio,

but we want to be strategic

about when we decide to do that.

OK,

so remember I can come over here to this tab manager and see what's going on

in my sort of overall file structure for this

project

called NES.

We

just looked at the Part studios and we were looking at the S/S button,

I'm closing this

so that I don't have to look at those.

I also have drawings

in here.

We can get into the drawing environment,

for example,

we can come in here

to the S/S button and we come into the S/S button.

We're now in

the environment where we create CAD

drawings,

OK?

All right,

so that's

that and I just want to point out here in the Assembly

studios,

we have

both

subassemblies this SA, S/S button is a subassembly

and the NES controller is

an assembly of parts and

subassemblies.

Can we close out this thing so we don't have to look at this.

I can come click this again and that will make it so I don't see it.

This

assembly, of course, is made up of,

let's go look at this for a second,

activate this one is made up of all of these parts.

These parts all existed for the most part in their own part studio,

but are now being referenced together here in this assembly

environment. We might think of it as an

assembly file but it's really just an assembly environment

in the cloud

space here in this

Onshape

sort of environment that we're working in.

OK,

so that's

the basic structure.

And now I need to just show you what it looks like when

we're saving things and what histories look like and other things like this.

This is what the history of this

particular document looks like,

OK?

It captures the history of everything in

the NES project

all the way down from every part that was created and

every drawing that was created and every assembly that was created.

And so, here we can see that

the main PCB was complete

on July 31st.

We can see A/B button was also complete on July 31st.

We can see Part 1 top cover done on August 2nd,

and we can go back to any one of these,

for example,

here,

and we will find the state

of the entire project

at that moment,

OK?

So, this

is

is what the top cover looked like at that point,

OK?

I can see it's not complete.

I'm familiar with this object.

It's not complete.

That's because it's not complete until Part 3 is complete,

or Part 3 is done.

And here we can see now that that is complete,

these

features right in here

were added.

OK,

so I'm going back in time to August 2nd

to see what things look

like at that point,

but I can always come right back up here to Main,

which is the current sort of working

version

of the object

and see where we are.

This is what the top cover looks like once the decal

has been put on there.

OK,

what did we do in this video?

I have tried to

give you a sense

for what's going on in Onshape,

especially as it relates to

file structure,

which can be quite difficult to understand if you're not knowing

how Onshape is using the word document which in my mind

basically means like a top level folder, like a project folder.

It's also hard to know if you don't know what Onshape means when they

say Part Studio or Part Studio is a place where you create parts,

right?

And then Assembly studio is a place where you create assemblies.

And in those

Part studios you are creating parts,

usually one part per Part Studio,

occasionally multiple parts per Part Studio.

And

then in your Assembly Studio,

what are you doing?

You're referencing those parts

that are in your Parts studios to create assemblies.

And the same thing is going on with the drawings

and like we would know sort of in any computer system

we can make it so that there's a hierarchy

of folders,

subfolders

that include these studios where our parts exist

and we can access those

by

looking at what you know is more traditionally thought of as like

how folders are laid out.

Even though we should know that

it's

web native,

it's in the Cloud,

it doesn't exist on our computer anywhere,

but we can

now treat this Cloud-based data

the way modern computing is basically

dealing with this stuff

where we have versions, and we have branches, and we have merges, and we have histories,

we have all those other kinds of things that keep track of

the work that we have done.