by David Gate
When working with assemblies it is often useful to use View Representations to aid your work by hiding parts or subassemblies.
Often these View Representations become even more useful when your creating assembly drawing views.
First in your assembly create the View Reps that you require.
Once you are happy with your View Reps, you have a few options. But most commonly you want the chosen View to stay as it is.
Right Click on the View Rep and chose to Lock it. You will then notice a small padlock next to the View Rep.
This then allows you to create a drawing view for each of your view reps and be confident that they will remain/include the same components as they did when you created them. So any further components added to an assembly would appear with all your view representations and require making invisible. If you do not lock your View Reps then the same is true any new items added will by default appear visible in all unlocked view reps.
If you want to update your locked view rep, simply first right click and unlock it, make your changes and then lock it again.
One tip when creating the Drawing Views is to make sure they are Associative, otherwise if you change the View Rep in the assembly the drawing view may not update correctly.
If you notice in the above image the advantage of using the view reps is that all the balloons are based from the same BOM structure and therefore all tie into a single Parts List.
If we hadn’t used View Reps and just placed a drawing view of the sub-assembly shown then the balloons would have to be added manually with overrides and therefore not update.
As the View Rep created in the original Assembly is locked if any further parts are added to the model then these will not appear in the locked drawing view, but they will appear in any unlocked views and the master view representation!
One final tip when using view representations is that you can filter your Parts List on your drawing by View Representations. Double click on the Parts List title.
Then under Filter Settings you can apply a View Rep Filter.
