I had three drawings that needed to be combined into a single drawing while
capturing all the same views and details (and, I hoped, without redoing
all
the work). I thought I'd seen something, though never used it, that was a
menu pick of 'Merge Drawings'. But, I couldn't find it.
Well, just by accident, I went to the Insert menu and tried 'Shared
Data>From file' and picked the drawing whose contents I wanted to add to
the
existing top level inseparable assembly. Bingo, the sheets were copied
from
the second drawing into the first, appended to the end of the drawing. And
the views didn't lose a dimension. I did this with a third drawing as well
and got all the information into the drawing.
Then, to finish the job, the separately named "parts" were duplicated in
Intralink with 'Duplicate Objects' with the 'update parents' option
(assembly and drawing) set to yes. Then, when I opened the drawing and did
'File>Update>Current', it brought in the updated assembly and showed the
"renamed" items in the weldment BOM. Their models were even added to the
Drawing Models list, replacing the previous versions. Best of all, I
didn't
have to manually do the ever awkward 'Replace' which generally loses
assembly constraints, causes subsequent components to fail/freeze, loses
BOM
balloons, etc. This was slick as snot on a brass doorknob {somewhere up
there with Teflon in slickness}.
David Janes
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