I need your thoughts about the following issue.

we have a skeleton with several sketches that defines the working area in an assembly.

those sketches are hand made sometimes and sometimes they drawn from intersection with an existing part in the assembly.

each user take some of those sketches to his sub assembly or part and works around it.

up to recently we have used convert entities from the main sketch into the local sub assembly sketch and than using it to create the part.

it gave us the confidence that the sketch segments are fully defined and placed. on the other hand it causes a lot of connections between the sketches.

I have tried to use the idea of derived sketch as a connection to the main assembly sketches.

it seems to be working off the load, because it is only one connection per sketch.

also if a sketch segment in the main layout was deleted it updates perfectly with out errors (in the convert entities it sometime gives error, depends on the segment converted)

on the other hand you have to manually fix the derived sketch into location, because it floats as one unit.

another issue is sketch fillets.

if the main sketch contains many fillets (because of intersection for example) in the convert method you may not convert it. in the derive method you are forced and it might cause a longer rebuild time and lower performance.

which do you is better.

Please share your thoughts.

Best regards,

Eyal siryon.

SolidWorks CAD IT manager.