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As any good person will tell you, in life you need to take care of your parents, naturally this holds true for Copy Design as well.
Whether it's a member of the AutoCAD family or your Inventor assemblies and documentation, changes to file status in the copy will affect its parents, which is why we have included the ability to "Automatically Copy Parents", simplifying the need to identify affected parents as part of your copy.
In the video below we will take a look at some simple examples of this behavior with the settings on and off.
Selecting Automatically Copy Parents, any sub component we copy will in turn copy each node in the tree above it so we see a chain of copied structure, You will still need to set destinations and configure names for these files, but we have taken care of at least identifying the required copies.
Turning off the Auto Copy you will notice straight away that copying a dependent without its parent marks the parent with the red Edit action. This is important – many users of the old Copy Design likely weren't aware that when we didn't copy a parent file this actually resulted in a change to the parent – almost like a replace action.
Its now much clearer, if your intent is to edit rather than copy, that this will be the outcome. Note though that the Edit action is only flagged on direct parents, the higher level parents do not recognize the edit, they are still consuming what is essentially the same sub-assembly, these will need to be updated to consume the editing file none the less.
A nice tip here is to check on the actions panel to identify files unintentionally being edited, to ensure no accidental changes are applied. From the Actions panel we can change the current action on right click.
In this example, as we change copy status with the automatic settings turned off you will see additional files are edited by our change. Marking all affected parents to Copy instead of Edit we are now ready to execute.
Something else we will look to cover as part of our "Drawing View" investigation is the automated settings for associated drawings, but the rule around copying parents does apply to drawings as well, with "Automatically Copy Parents" enabled drawing files will be copied along with the models.
Note too that there are instances where we do not want to copy or edit a parent as part of the operation and we have a setting for that too, a feature we'll cover this in the not too distant future.
– Allan
