Reloading components includes nested components?

swithinbankp

Somewhere in my self-taught sketchup I think I must have misunderstood the way components are saved and reloaded. Help!

I am designing some staging for a greenhouse. I started off modelling the greenhouse. I have a top level component, called "frame", which is a top level component in the greenhouse. I then started modelling the staging, called "staging", which is another top level component in the greenhouse. Frame and Staging have no components in common, but each has plenty of components. When I looked at the component browser for the greenhouse, set to components in the model, I saw only "frame" and "staging", none of the components that these two components are made from.

I saved staging off as another file, and when I opened the component browser this time, for in model components, I saw all the components the staging is made up from, from multiple levels in the model. This is what I expected to see when I browsed the greenhouse model. That is question 1. Why is the behavior different?

I decided to carry on modelling the staging as a separate file, and then reload the staging in the greenhouse model. When I reloaded the staging in the greenhouse model, the results were not as I expected, so as a test I decided to save the staging component again, but as a different file. When I looked at the component browser for the in model components in the new staging file, rather than find the staging model I had been working on as a separate file, I found the new file contained the old sub components of the staging model, and not the newly worked components from the separate staging file I had been working on. My assumption had been that when I reloaded the staging model in the greenhouse file, the whole tree within the staging component would be replaced (bare in mind it has no common components with the frame component). I am not sure quite what sketchup has done, but it has not done that. And I can see that if components are not wholly contained in the subtree, it would have difficulty preserving the modeller's intent. So question 2 is does sketchup load "subcomponents" from a reloaded model, and what does it do to the naming of the subcomponents? Question 3 is, what is the best way to split a model into separate files to work on separately, but to also have a parent model that maintains the spatial relationships between the submodels?

P.S. The name of the components in the sub models is important to me. I intend to break out the sub components as separate models when I move on the fabrication stage. Keeping the name constant would help with this. Perhaps I should assign the same instance name to each instance of a definition, so if the definition name is changed by sketchup the instances retain the same instance name?

pilou

Normally there is no reason that a file saved, will be different at reloaded in a new session!

filibis

I think you're struggling with this:

Right click to your component in the viewport > Save as
File > Save as

These are two different things. Check this for more info.