CAD Forum

CarrieIves

Most of the SolidWorks macros you could find online to copy when I started were in VBA. You can also use this language to program Excel macros. I don't have very many macros because there aren't that many things that we have that are repetitive, but we do save PDFs and STEPs with revision informatio...

CarrieIves

Mostly we use display states. I have recommended that we try to use display states for our assembly steps rather than configurations.

Other than display states sometimes forgetting themselves, are there gotchas we should watch out for?

CarrieIves

We are using PDM standard, SolidWorks 2023, SP4.0 We have a top level assembly that has a bunch of configurations in it that represent different areas of the assembly. They kinda relate to assembly steps. If we do not have display data marks for the configurations, the file size of the SLDASM is abo...

CarrieIves

I'm currently reading 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, which is in the 1632 series started by Eric Flint, about a town in modern West Virginia that is transported to Germany in 1632, in the middle of the 30 Years War. The series should definitely be read in order, or if not in order, definitely read 1632...

CarrieIves

I read a lot of light "popcorn" type reads. I will read e-books on my phone, so they conveniently get carried around in my pocket, physical books, or listen to audiobooks. I heavily utilize my library for all the book formats and found there were other libraries I could get cards for to ge...

CarrieIves

I have done this in the past, but there is a manual update if filenames change. I assign a property called "Material" in my part that is set to the SolidWorks material. I then may put a property in my assembly called "Material". It gets set to "SW-Material@<partname>.SLDPRT&...

CarrieIves

TLDR - make sure copy tree gets all your files and that if you use Pack and Go with PDM, you save where you mean to. Something I have noticed on copy tree, it seems to default to only selecting the files in the same folder, so I have had to manually force it to select other files so that I get all t...

CarrieIves

We were lucky the clouds cleared enough for us to actually see the totality. We walked over to the large park near our house. The schools near us took the kids outside. I heard from a neighbor that was about two blocks from the elementary that she could hear all the kids yelling in excitement. I thi...

CarrieIves

@josh Is there a way to flip the sketch plane normal after a sketch exists?

CarrieIves

We had the opportunity to head a few hours south this weekend and enjoy the Texas Hill Country. It always surprises me how much a few hours drive can make in what season you are in. Our bluebonnets are just starting here in the Dallas area, but the ones down near Fredericksburg, TX are well are thei...

CarrieIves

If you have multiple configurations in PDM, make sure to add a display data mark to each configuration. If you don't when the part has to be at a new configuration than the one it was saved at (For example you change from the 12mm L bolt to the 16mm L bolt) PDM thinks the part was modified. If it is...

CarrieIves

These are both in the same PDM vault, right? PDM standard keeps track of the references for you. The easiest way to do this is have an explorer window open to the folder with the assembly and another window open to the folder you want it to end up in. Just drag and drop. You are going to have to pic...

CarrieIves

When we save a PDF into a PDM folder it automatically adds to the vault based on our settings in PDM for adding file types. We only have PDM Standard so can't do PDM macros, but our save as PDF SolidWorks macro, puts the PDF in the right folder. The setting adds it. We then just have to check it in.

CarrieIves

We don't always get mates deleted when components are deleted. I have found that sometimes those will come back if a component was deleted and then added back to the assembly. So, I put a component in (forgetting that it had been in that assembly weeks ago) and try to add new constraints to put it w...

CarrieIves

On further testing, I think it deletes them as you open the directory. I ran a search for local files this morning and found several. When I then went to the directory they were in, they were not there.

CarrieIves

It now has a bug report.
https://support.3ds.com/knowledge-base/ ... 0000371017

CarrieIves

Add an option to set a folder as the default destination for Copy Tree and Pack and Go https://r1132100503382-eu1-3dswym.3dexperience.3ds.com/#community:I23-EB1ZRQyk2sLG5y9Kig/idea:wHjSg1XfQImApcmISq9d-g Add warnings to Pack and Go when PDM is in use https://r1132100503382-eu1-3dswym.3dexperience.3d...

CarrieIves

Arthur NY They were able to just do a "save as" on the top level assembly. They didn't have to do anything special. It probably helped that it started as a SW2023 assembly, went to my customer, they made some moderate changes in SW2024, and then did the save as to hand it back to me to wo...

CarrieIves

We have actually benefitted from this functionality. We are in SW2023. Our customer is starting to use SolidWorks and had to send us some files to work on for them. They were able to save back to SW2023 so that I could pick up the work for us.

CarrieIves

They usually post all the break out sessions online sometime after the conference.

I am going to attend the expo portion because my VAR got me a pass to that and I'm local to the area.

CarrieIves

It seemed like it worked more like updating the cache on login. I didn't do much testing. One user moved several files. These were shown as local files. I logged out and back in, and they were no longer in that folder. We only have two users here that have views of our sandbox set up.

CarrieIves

It seemed to do what I wanted in my sandbox, so the main vault now has that setting.

CarrieIves

It's more that library parts get saved to the project folder initially. (We are supposed to save to the correct library folder, but we aren't as diligent as we should be.) We move them to the library before we finish checking and releasing the library parts. I will try to set up my sandbox with enou...

CarrieIves

Whatever it is, a file in cache that's not in vault is worse than the chance of deleting a file that the user needs. I cannot recall every hearing of a file being removed from cache, I was looking for evidence of this as I was ready with the response, "that's why we check new files in!" i...

CarrieIves

Are you using the setting "Automatically delete local read-only files that are not part of the file vault"? We are using PDM standard and when someone else moves a file, we get left with local files if we had previously cached that file. Before I toggle this setting, I wanted to see what r...

CarrieIves

Simscale does have a free option. Did it not run the types of analysis you wanted? We looked at it a few years ago and the pricing wasn't bad for what they offered. They also had the ability to sell a lower plan than their standard one to us if we didn't need as much analysis time. We didn't end up ...

CarrieIves

We don't have anything to automatically generate step files, but we do have a macro that saves it with the right filename to the right location. (I have gotten spoiled and hate having to actually hit file save as for things like STEP, PDF, STL) The engineer runs the macro at points when the step fil...

CarrieIves

And my VAR did open a ticket and I have an SR# - SR01127639-01. Not sure if anyone besides me, my VAR, and SW can see it, but it's there.

CarrieIves

Because we are on PDM standard, we can't modify the task. So, I have asked all my users to make sure and uncheck the "View PDF after saving". This should allow the PDF creation task to work. (I was working with my VAR, and we thought we had changed a setting that fixed the problem, but it ...

CarrieIves

This probably isn't your problem, but I saw this from Alin about "Make "Automatically populate View Palette with views" a Document Property" https://r1132100503382-eu1-3dswym.3dexperience.3ds.com/#community:YxU3ReG0QkqGc0lvBHo6TQ/idea:WiuTqg6_QhGsCeeri93_Sw Are there more views i...

CarrieIves

AlexB Thank you for the example. I don't know what I had wrong in my macro, but was able to finally step through and get it to line up with what you provided (with my filename and location adjustments) What I am thinking of doing, is having all our users uncheck the "View PDF after saving"...

CarrieIves

@gupta9665 It would be nice to save the SolidWorks properties into the PDF, but I'm not sure how to see the PDF properties.

CarrieIves

SPerman - I tried your suggestion of entering swExportData_ExpoprtAllSheets instead of 1. I got runtime error '424' "Object required" gupta9665 - I updated my macro to what I think you suggested and got error '438' "Object doesn't support this property or method" in the Set swEx...

CarrieIves

So, I have been trying to rework my regular save as PDF macro (not what is used as a PDM task) to follow the example. I want to always save all sheets. The number of sheets varies by drawing. So, my macro did use: swModel.SaveAs (fullfilename) fullfilename is derived from properties in the model and...

CarrieIves

We have a Save as PDF macro we run from SolidWorks. If I were to manually save as PDF, I can adjust the check box "View PDF after saving". Is there an API call for SolidWorks that can toggle this? image.png Also, the description property from SolidWorks shows here. I don't know that the in...

CarrieIves

AlexLachance - I usually get pretty good response from my VAR, but I do know they are stuck with SolidWorks functioning as it does. I'm really trying to determine if this is normal functionality in PDM standard. Mostly, I would like to know if other users of PDM STANDARD have run into this issue. T...

CarrieIves

We recently updated our PDM to SolidWorks 2023. We only have PDM standard. The only task we can run during a workflow transition is the stock save as PDF that they have available. This task has the admin account open the drawing and save as PDF with a specified filename, copies specified properties ...

CarrieIves

Glenn Schroeder Maybe because of the chill, we might get more colors than just yellow here when the leaves change. (Our leaves have just started changing here in the Dallas area. And yes, we do have trees.) I was able to wear my cape last night when walking with the kids trick-or-treating. AlexLach...

CarrieIves

@SPerman
How has your PDM Standard been doing on Azure? Our company is looking to move from on-site servers to Azure in the next few months. Anything we should watch out for?

Thanks,
Carrie

CarrieIves

It was 31 C (89 F) here on Friday. We have a freeze warning overnight. I was late leaving the house this morning because I didn't plan to deal with frost on the windshield. Looks like we get a few days of fall this week. It's currently 16 C (61F) and sunny. Looks like it should be a good night to tr...

CarrieIves

I really like the shared Excel and Word and PowerPoint. Having more than one person working at a time is nice.
We use Trello here also. We use it for tracking project status and working with our customers capturing requirements.

CarrieIves

On the custom properties, are you modifying the configuration specific properties? The @ tab in PDM and the configuration specific ones sometimes update where you don't expect them to.

CarrieIves

If you have the option "Automatically populate view pallet with views" checked, it will create the config for you when you start a drawing of the sheetmetal part.

CarrieIves

We are successfully saving right now and it is STEP 203.

I added these two lines:

Dim stepversion As Long
stepversion = swApp.SetUserPreferenceIntegerValue(swUserPreferenceIntegerValue_e.swStepAP, 214)

Now it is saving in STEP 214.

Thanks.

CarrieIves

I'm not figuring out how to specify the STEP format in my save as macro. We go thru a bunch of stuff in my macro to set the name with the revision and the correct file path. Here's where we set up fullfilename and then our save command. fullfilename = FileLocation & sFileName & "_Rev&qu...

CarrieIves

What happens if you uncheck the "Read file contents" check box for that state in your workflow for the groups that aren't the supervisors? The image below is the permissions the engineers group has for our template files. They can see them but that's all. Or you may want to remove that gro...

CarrieIves

Something we have noticed on my drawing templates in SW 2023. I decided to only save as my 2023 templates from my 2022 templates. If I open a template in 2023 and do a save as new drawing template filename, when I open that new copy, the template thinks it is the old filename as far as the bar acros...

CarrieIves

It looks like I can open drawings at normal speed from our just upgraded to 2023, SP4.0 vault.

CarrieIves

Related - In SolidWorks 2022, if you have two cut extrudes to create a counterbore, you can use the hole callout to create a hole callout with the counterbore symbol and depth. (You have to pick the outer cut for it to work, I think.) It will not let you apply a tolerance to more than one of the dim...

CarrieIves

We have a company sharepoint where we have pages for various types of info people may need. I have been putting a lot of our information on there. (For example, how to create a new user in PDM with screenshots.) We do have a couple of formal procedures, but that doesn't cover the other things. Gener...

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