CAD Forum

Something just occurred to me. I'm working on a sketch full of construction lines that will be used to drive a Hole Wizard feature. I like to use relations instead of dimensions whenever possible, which brings up a question. I have several lines with an Equal relation. Is there a way to add another line to that group without adding an additional relation?

To clarify, I have one line that has a relation making it Equal length to two other lines. I'd like to make a new line Equal length to these three lines, but if I just add a new relation between one of the original lines and the new one the old one will have two Equal relation icons beside it instead of just one (see below).

Does it even matter? Am I overthinking this, and just need to go on with my life?

I thought I could do it with the Display/Delete relations property manager, but I couldn't get it to work.

This has always annoyed the hell out of me - I don't think we have any option other than to not worry about it.

The time it really matters is when we have a design change - you can pretty much guarantee that the one you need to change is driving others that don't need to change.

Linked Dimensions are also a good alternative, but they are very slow to work with.

@Glenn Schroeder

This one confuses me, there is no group to "add" to. Just an equal relation between two lines. You can't have one equal relation between say, 3 lines.....it creates 2 equal relations, One for line segement 1 & 2 and one for line segment 2 & 3.

jcapriotti wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 6:23 pm @Glenn Schroeder

This one confuses me, there is no group to "add" to. Just an equal relation between two lines. You can't have one equal relation between say, 3 lines.....it creates 2 equal relations, One for line segement 1 & 2 and one for line segment 2 & 3.

Yes, there was a group to add to. Maybe I didn't explain well enough. I had Ctrl+selected several lines (I don't remember exactly how many, but it was at least 3). That produced one Equal relation and icon at each of those lines. I'm looking for a way to add a new line to that group without adding a second relation and icon to one of them. Does that explain it better?

Glenn Schroeder wrote: ↑Sat Apr 03, 2021 12:27 pm Yes, there was a group to add to. Maybe I didn't explain well enough. I had Ctrl+selected several lines (I don't remember exactly how many, but it was at least 3). That produced one Equal relation and icon at each of those lines. I'm looking for a way to add a new line to that group without adding a second relation and icon to one of them. Does that explain it better?

In this pic, I selected all 3 lines and applied an equal relation from the popup bar. It adds two equal relations, not one group. Notice the middle segment has both, linked to each outer segment. This is 2021 sp2. Can you attach an example, maybe some other workflow is doing this.

jcapriotti wrote: ↑Sat Apr 03, 2021 12:48 pm

Glenn Schroeder wrote: ↑Sat Apr 03, 2021 12:27 pm Yes, there was a group to add to. Maybe I didn't explain well enough. I had Ctrl+selected several lines (I don't remember exactly how many, but it was at least 3). That produced one Equal relation and icon at each of those lines. I'm looking for a way to add a new line to that group without adding a second relation and icon to one of them. Does that explain it better?

In this pic, I selected all 3 lines and applied an equal relation from the popup bar. It adds two equal relations, not one group. Notice the middle segment has both, linked to each outer segment. This is 2021 sp2. Can you attach an example, maybe some other workflow is doing this.

image.png

You're right. I'm surprised I never noticed that extra icon before.

Glenn Schroeder wrote: ↑Sat Apr 03, 2021 12:27 pm

jcapriotti wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 6:23 pm @Glenn Schroeder

This one confuses me, there is no group to "add" to. Just an equal relation between two lines. You can't have one equal relation between say, 3 lines.....it creates 2 equal relations, One for line segement 1 & 2 and one for line segment 2 & 3.

Yes, there was a group to add to. Maybe I didn't explain well enough. I had Ctrl+selected several lines (I don't remember exactly how many, but it was at least 3). That produced one Equal relation and icon at each of those lines. I'm looking for a way to add a new line to that group without adding a second relation and icon to one of them. Does that explain it better?

When you select a whole bunch of lines and then hit the = constraint...
What is actually happening is that line 1 will be = to line 2, then line 2 will be = to line 3, then line 3 will be = to line 4...etc...

I wish that we could select 1 line, then select however many other lines, and make them all equal to that 1 line.....all at once instead of making them equal to each other like that.

Would make debugging the design easier and would make changes (potentially) easier as well.