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This is one of those, "I did not know I couldn't do that" posts: well for some of you anyways.
When it came to copying components in the old version of Copy Design, if you wanted to copy a single part or file you had to copy every reference to that part or file, meaning if you had hardware used in 3 or 4 places in your assembly, you had no choice but to copy or replace every instance used everywhere.
I show an example of this in the video below, using the default component selection mode I click to copy a file and we see all references of the file are set to copy, changing to "Reference Select" mode in 2016 though, we can now start to select individual component references to copy or replace.
Its important here though we start to leverage some useful properties to understand what's going on. In the video you will see I have a modified version of the Padlock assembly loaded which contains multiple references to a number of parts (the parts are differentiated here by being in at different levels of the model structure). Next to these files we have the "ID" and "Count" fields enabled. These two numeric values are used to distinguish which reference to that part we are working on (ID) and how many references to the file there are (Count).
In normal selection mode I copy 1 reference and both are set to copy, you will see that both of the files references get new ID's because we are creating new files and we still want to differentiate references, but you will see the count remains at "2" because we are creating one new file with 2 references.
Make sense?
Now I switch to Reference select, and choose to reuse one of these references – the count on both is now "1", that is, we have 1 reference to the original component, 1 reference to the new copied component.
Easy huh?! I can now opt to only copy or replace the 1 reference I want.
There is one more twist though, look what happens though when I select to copy that second reference again – it is now set to copy, but its reference count is still "1".
What this means is I am now building 2 new components, not 1. The new assembly will feature 2 separate components that were formally one file. You need to keep an eye on this if it is not your intention and we will dive a little deeper into how to resolve this situation in the "Replace" topic.
Switching across to our panels we can see now the source file with 2 different destination files. Using the ID property and cross highlighting we can also identify which is which and specify differing numbering schemes or locations.
This addition means we now have greatly enhanced flexibility with copying components, and much better control over our references, deciding what truly needs to be copied or reused and where previously we would need to open the file and restore references after the copy, it can now all be done directly in the Copy Design tool.
Happy Reference Copying!
– Allan
