TreeView Management

[SpaceCase]

Greetings. I have fallen astray again, alas!

I found that, sometimes, to "create a link to an external geometry", you have to roll your Sketch over and work on the Backside. Then, you can't Select any Endpoints unless you roll the Sketch back over and work on the Frontside.

Also explored Symmetry Constraints, as Sketcher Lecture favors Geometric Constraints over Dimensional, and found out also why it cautions against over-depending on Symmetry. Lots of Partial Redundancies to clear out, yes.

I had a Model with every Sketch but one Attached Offset from a Base Plane. The one Sketch Attached to a Generated Face was a few circles, Constrained between a couple External Geometry Vertexes, for Pad and Fillet, then Transform to a Linear Pattern.

The Model needed one last tweak, to move two vertical Lines farther apart, on the very first Sketch, nowhere near the External Geometry Vertexes and not Constrained to them in any way, and the Pad off that Sketch adjusted perfectly. The Linear Pattern, though, collapsed. The two External Geometry Vertexes somehow turned to Skew Lines on all three Base Planes, and the Circle Elements scattered hither and yon.

Deleted all the External Geometry Elements off the List, but when trying to re-establish an External Geometry Vertex, FreeCAD only displayed these Skew Lines instead.

Tried Restraining the Circle Elements to a Construction Line instead, but by then I had Alarms all over the whole Tree, and the more things I fixed, the more mixed up the Features got so I couldn't hardly tell which Fillets were on which Features, and I just gave up, hafta go back and start from scratch. I need to be able to take the Tree apart and re-arrange it.

Searched for a way to Un-Depend its Features and Re-Depend them elsewhere, but the only thing I can find that even comes close is

The tip can be changed by the user.

from the Tree View Page of FreeCAD instructions. I know there's prob'ly scads of tips and the answer's prob'ly painfully obvious, and many apologies for not finding it on my own, but, could you please tutor me in how to re-arrange the Document Tree?

Thank you again forever.

OS: Windows 10 Version 2004
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.24276 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: releases/FreeCAD-0-19
Hash: a88db11e0a908f6e38f92bfc5187b13ebe470438
Python version: 3.8.6+
Qt version: 5.15.1
Coin version: 4.0.1
OCC version: 7.5.0
Locale: English/United States (en_US)

[drmacro]

Go to the properties pane. Click in the Map Mode text box.

Mapmode.png (27.58 KiB) Viewed 304 times

You will see an ellipsis appear:

Mapmode_elipsis.png (17.4 KiB) Viewed 304 times

The following dialog will appear if you click the ellipsis and you can re-attach as necessary.

Snip macro screenshot-b9004f.png (80.76 KiB) Viewed 304 times

You'll also note in the first mage above the External G... field. It lists any external geometry used in the sketch, the ellipsis there can be used to clear invaid external references. (Note: this can also be done in the Validate sketch tool.)

[SpaceCase]

Thank you, I am struggling to comprehend. You will see how easily-lost I am when you hear how I followed your pointer

in the first mage above the External G... field. It lists any external geometry

I looked all over 'in the first image' 'above the External G... field', only to finally realize you really meant 'in the first image above' 'the External G... field' and so on. Parsing error this time, ha-ha. At least I figured this one out.

I get completely lost at

The following dialog will appear if you click the ellipsis and you can re-attach as necessary.

even though there's a high degree of confidence I have it correctly parsed this time.

All I see are options I have no idea what they do, and how re-attaching a Sketch relates to changing the Feature's Tree Dependency I can't imagine, but the only thing I could find in your attachments was

TempSnip1.PNG (30.39 KiB) Viewed 274 times

, which I remember reading in the past but never found any discussion later. So, I'm going to revisit the Basic Attachment Tutorial and if I still don't get it, can I make a simple Model that needs Tree re-arranging, and get a step-by-step how to do that?

And can you tell me where to find the Documents for these Models:

TempSnip.PNG (178.98 KiB) Viewed 274 times

? I'd like to study them. Thanks.

[drmacro]

re-attaching a Sketch relates to changing the Feature's Tree Dependency

It is the sketch dependency that has been whacked and needs to be fixed.