SolidWorks PDM, templates, library features, standard notes

[CarrieIves]

We are slowly inching closer to actually implementing SolidWorks PDM Standard (we have SW Professional).

Today, I am thinking about our folder structure in PDM which lead to me wondering about where I should store templates and such.

Currently, we work off network drives. We have each customer's project in its own folder. We are not currently putting any files like nuts, screws, washers, etc. into a library. IF any of those are reused from one project to another, currently, we just have multiple copies. As we move into PDM, I know that we will need to put all those common parts into a library so we only have one of each in PDM.

What else are you putting into your "Library" in PDM?

Do you store your part, assembly, and drawing templates in PDM or on a network drive?

If you have library features, are they in PDM or on a network drive?
We have a few standard notes. Should those also be in PDM or just left on a network drive?

Thanks,
Carrie

[bnemec]

Please don't have multiple files by the same name anywhere in the universe. Solidworks will use the wrong one.

We have PDM Pro and thought it would be smart to put the templates (drawing, bom, etc) and other stuff in a PDM folder. I'm regretting that. If for any reason that document in the vault is not available at the moment SW needs it, SW will switch the file locations back to the default locations. It will do this silently and not change them back, so users will use the wrong ones until this is noticed and the File Locations settings corrected. We are just about ready to edit our login script to copy our templates from network share to the default locations. This way we're not fighting with SW's opinion of where it should look for these files.
Why would these documents not be available? Various reasons, we've seen: VPN not connected yet, network connection from PDM client to PDM server broken (PDM is not smart enough to notice that the connection has been lost and start a new one, the user must exit PDM to kick it), out of licenses at the moment (may not apply with SW Pro/PDM Standard).

That's just been my perception.

[MJuric]

It will do this silently and not change them back, so users will use the wrong ones until this is noticed and the File Locations settings corrected.

Does it do this even if the path that the old templates are on are not in the search path or template paths? Can you just remove that path and fix this?

Personally I'm a big fan of EVERYTHING on the PDM although none of our templates are so maybe it causes issues. PDM is one of the best ways to be able to control documents and recover old versions if someone hoses the current one. This is especially true lacking a consistent and solid backup regiment.

[bnemec]

Does it do this even if the path that the old templates are on are not in the search path or template paths? Can you just remove that path and fix this?

Personally I'm a big fan of EVERYTHING on the PDM although none of our templates are so maybe it causes issues. PDM is one of the best ways to be able to control documents and recover old versions if someone hoses the current one. This is especially true lacking a consistent and solid backup regiment.

To be honest. I don't really know, there's like a million variables all changing a million things on all the computers and after a year and a half when I think I have something figured out I just realize I'm wrong again...

when you say "old templates" do you mean the default location in the users local\temp ? When I look at file locations that is what is added to templates when the vault is not accessible. It also adds places like ProgramData\Solidworks\... and Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS\lang\english... I could have swore in the past I had seen that it removed the path to the vault templates when the vault was not accessable, but I could be mixing things up, or user was in there "fixing" or ???

Search Paths: SW (or something)keeps adding paths in there that I used to keep deleting. I gave up with those almost a year ago. Here's what mine looks like right now even though I've cleared it out before:

Template Paths: yes I can delete out the undesired but it just puts it back in next time vault path not accessible. Or so it seems.

[MJuric]

To be honest. I don't really know, there's like a million variables all changing a million things on all the computers and after a year and a half when I think I have something figured out I just realize I'm wrong again...

when you say "old templates" do you mean the default location in the users local\temp ? When I look at file locations that is what is added to templates when the vault is not accessible. It also adds places like ProgramData\Solidworks\... and Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS\lang\english... I could have swore in the past I had seen that it removed the path to the vault templates when the vault was not accessable, but I could be mixing things up, or user was in there "fixing" or ???

Search Paths: SW (or something)keeps adding paths in there that I used to keep deleting. I gave up with those almost a year ago. Here's what mine looks like right now even though I've cleared it out before:
image.png

Template Paths: yes I can delete out the undesired but it just puts it back in next time vault path not accessible. Or so it seems.

image.png

I just looked at my "Search paths" and what a cluster. Clearly it's adding anything and everything in there which seems ridiculously stupid. Just because I save a file in some obscure location it doesn't mean I want that location to now be permanently part of my search path, in fact exactly the opposite. I'm saving it in an obscure location because I DON'T want it to be in my search path.

I'm wondering if there is a setting to fix this.

If SW does the same thing with template locations that's just asinine. I do not want you looking for "the right" template for me. The right template is where I told you it would be. If it's not there...yell at me. Don't just go pick one you like.

[bnemec]

I just looked at my "Search paths" and what a cluster. Clearly it's adding anything and everything in there which seems ridiculously stupid. Just because I save a file in some obscure location it doesn't mean I want that location to now be permanently part of my search path, in fact exactly the opposite. I'm saving it in an obscure location because I DON'T want it to be in my search path.

I'm wondering if there is a setting to fix this.

If SW does the same thing with template locations that's just asinine. I do not want you looking for "the right" template for me. The right template is where I told you it would be. If it's not there...yell at me. Don't just go pick one you like.

What you describe is what I think I have been seeing. Like I said though SW and PDM team up to confuse me regularly with years and years of cryptic implemented FIFYs. Like you said, >IF< SW does this with template locations... These automatic fixes just confuse me because unless I understand all the things it can do in all the various cases that the users may through at it I cannot figure out what it's doing. I'm high-jacking this thread, I must stop now.

trying to pull back to the original topic; as you stated it would be best to put all these things in PDM. It has permissions, versions, etc. But it doesn't really work. Oh, and it's nice to have materials db file in the vault so users don't accidentally edit it. However, SW is clueless that this behavior is intentional so it freaks out that the file cannot be updated when the user goes to change the material or just mess around with some settings.

Oh, and PDM Pro doesn't track file references to forming tools whether they are in the vault or not, so you have to manually make sure you have the correct version. Pro has setting to update local cache on login by folder, so if Standard does as well, I would suggest you set that up.

[jcapriotti]

We store all templates in PDM. The folder is set to cache on login so the user has the latest version. Even if the user loses connection, they should be able to operate in PDM offline mode since the files are cached. @bnemec Not sure what's happening in your case, we've been operating this way for many years.

We also have the materials db in PDM. Users aren't supposed to edit it, only our librarians who know it needs to be checked out before edit.

[AlexB]

We store all templates in PDM. The folder is set to cache on login so the user has the latest version. Even if the user loses connection, they should be able to operate in PDM offline mode since the files are cached. @bnemec Not sure what's happening in your case, we've been operating this way for many years.

We also have the materials db in PDM. Users aren't supposed to edit it, only our librarians who know it needs to be checked out before edit.

This is how we operate as well. All templates, BOM and Rev Tables, material database, notes, weldment profiles, etc. are all in PDM and set to cache on login. The only way to create an issue for yourself is if you log in to the vault, clear your cache and then try to work. In this instance, I believe that we would see strange generic templates show up. I'd like the option as admin to exclude directories from clearing when the user selects to clear their cache, but this has been working really well for years.

[MJuric]

We store all templates in PDM. The folder is set to cache on login so the user has the latest version. Even if the user loses connection, they should be able to operate in PDM offline mode since the files are cached. @bnemec Not sure what's happening in your case, we've been operating this way for many years.

We also have the materials db in PDM. Users aren't supposed to edit it, only our librarians who know it needs to be checked out before edit.

I would consider what you're doing as "ideal". Unfortunately I'm dealing with a ton of legacy data and regular occurrences of "Well we kinda set it up, well enough so we could get going and start doing things wrong"

Our tool box is not entirely set up properly either. Anyone can access and change the models because we never set up the TB to use the dedicated user. One of many things that "Need to get fixed"

[bnemec]

We store all templates in PDM. The folder is set to cache on login so the user has the latest version.

Same thing here

Even if the user loses connection, they should be able to operate in PDM offline mode since the files are cached.

ok, so most/some of the users get that. The ones with chronic issues don't notice their connection to PDM is off the rails for ? reason. In the case of the VPN users it seems they don't get the concept of off line, not to mention able to recognize when they would need to do it. I've tried explaining it I don't know how many times and ways.

@bnemec Not sure what's happening in your case,

Same thing here

I just looked and we're out of licenses again. We have 35 total for CAD editor and the usage varies throughout normal day usually somewhere between 4 and 10 available. So I have to go ask for more $$$$ because if SW tries to hit one of those vault folders when that pc cannot get a PDM license SW clobbers the file locations.

we've been operating this way for many years.

We also have the materials db in PDM. Users aren't supposed to edit it, only our librarians who know it needs to be checked out before edit.

[jcapriotti]

I just looked and we're out of licenses again. We have 35 total for CAD editor and the usage varies throughout normal day usually somewhere between 4 and 10 available. So I have to go ask for more $$$$ because if SW tries to hit one of those vault folders when that pc cannot get a PDM license SW clobbers the file locations.

This one is baffling me, if the user doesn't login to PDM, you get the login. If they aren't connected to the network, they should select "Work Offline" (User training issue). If they select the "X" in the top right they get this:

I wish this would throw them to offline mode but it doesn't. So when you launch SolidWorks and select new template, I get this:

No templates show, not even the out of the box defaults. But it doesn't remove the PDM template path either.

We have a script during Windows login that checks the registry for our SolidWorks template locations. If it doesn't find them, it re-adds them to the registry. That may help minimize what you're are seeing. You could also throw it into the Windows task scheduler and run it throughout the day since users may not reboot often.

[bnemec]

This one is baffling me, if the user doesn't login to PDM, you get the login. If they aren't connected to the network, they should select "Work Offline" (User training issue). If they select the "X" in the top right they get this:

image.png

yes training issue, again not all users. They don't understand why that dialog comes up because the login option is intentionally set to use server default which is set to use the windows log in (our PDM users are pulled from Active Directory). So they don't see it unless something is wrong. then they click ok or just try to close it which comes up with the "this will disable automatic login" dialog to which they just click ok but also do not understand what it means or what it's doing.

I wish this would throw them to offline mode but it doesn't.

The problem with offline mode is even though we've been working on learning our colors the problem users may or may not realize they are in off line mode. So then that whole can of worms opens up that they don't go back to online mode. They are slowly picking it up but in the mean time SW is erroring out wrong. In programming there's the concept of graceful failures or safe failures and then failures that trigger cascading issues. That cascading issues creates a support headache and the users certainly won't be able to follow what's going on, I barely can.

So when you launch SolidWorks and select new template, I get this:

image.png

No templates show, not even the out of the box defaults. But it doesn't remove the PDM template path either.

yes, you are correct. It does not remove the path to vault, just adds the default back in, but is snookers the defaults and seems they do not change back. More about default template behavior, the ideal would be to ask the user every time so they can visually see what template will be used, unfortunately that option is disguised as "advanced"

We have a script during Windows login that checks the registry for our SolidWorks template locations. If it doesn't find them, it re-adds them to the registry. That may help minimize what you're are seeing. You could also throw it into the Windows task scheduler and run it throughout the day since users may not reboot often.

I had no idea Solidworks and PDM would need this much hand holding, add-in, scripting to just do the jobs its advertised to do.

[jcapriotti]

yes, you are correct. It does not remove the path to vault, just adds the default back in, but is snookers the defaults and seems they do not change back. More about default template behavior, the ideal would be to ask the user every time so they can visually see what template will be used, unfortunately that option is disguised as "advanced"

See, in my example its not putting the defaults back....there are several "blank" templates. It never removes the path from the list....when logging into PDM, the templates come back. That's what's baffling me.

I had no idea Solidworks and PDM would need this much hand holding, add-in, scripting to just do the jobs its advertised to do.

I agree, the way it handles offline mode should be better. The users that only use PDM once in while get confused by the offline mode issue. They don't realize it because the standalone search tool still works even offline, and there is no indication it's offline since you don't see the folders to see the color. They just can't open the files. I think the standalone tool is forgotten as they expect you to use the built-in search in Windows Explorer.

[bnemec]

See, in my example its not putting the defaults back....there are several "blank" templates. It never removes the path from the list....when logging into PDM, the templates come back. That's what's baffling me.

I'm not sure they come back for me. let me see if I can test that.

It's sometimes hard to test things because I'll be in the middle of something and someone comes by with questions and I need to abort. I should just fire up another VM (Oracle Virtualbox desktop, not a real VM) on my machine so I can test without interruption. But then that would be pulling yet another set of licensees, did I mention we're lean on SW and PDM licenses?

I agree, the way it handles offline mode should be better. The users that only use PDM once in while get confused by the offline mode issue. They don't realize it because the standalone search tool still works even offline, and there is no indication it's offline since you don't see the folders to see the color. They just can't open the files. I think the standalone tool is forgotten as they expect you to use the built-in search in Windows Explorer.

I try to get people to use the stand alone search tool as default Vault access because otherwise they'll have five or six vault views open in a single windows explorer.exe process which takes the GDI objects over 10k and ... you know the rest. See I cannot get around or out from under one problem without getting kidney kicked by three other problems.

[berg_lauritz]

On another note:
This is something, that helped us reduce the amount of opened explorer windows. Being able to open up in LDR from windows explorer is just such a joy for large assemblies.

[CarrieIves]

For those of you that are refreshing cache on login, are you refreshing for just template folders? I was thinking that I would set up the folder structure as "Library" and "Projects". Should I refine that to be "Library", "Templates", and "Projects" instead?

[AlexB]

For those of you that are refreshing cache on login, are you refreshing for just template folders? I was thinking that I would set up the folder structure as "Library" and "Projects". Should I refine that to be "Library", "Templates", and "Projects" instead?

Yes, just the system folders so that the files referenced by solidworks will be refreshed in the local cache for the user. You definitely don't want to auto-cache any more than necessary.

[CarrieIves]

@AlexB Are you leaving anything outside PDM? Macros? SolidWorks settings files?

Do you still use the properties tab builder since there is also the data card?

[jcapriotti]

@AlexB Are you leaving anything outside PDM? Macros? SolidWorks settings files?

Do you still use the properties tab builder since there is also the data card?

For us, its all in PDM. We don't use the Property Tab Builder but built our own custom property editor which is also in PDM. The folder is set to cache, about 165mb. We also cache our standard parts (fasteners, purchased parts) folder which is fairly large (850mb) but is needed if you want to drag them in from the design library. Once its cached, its quick after that.

[AlexB]

For us, its all in PDM. We don't use the Property Tab Builder but built our own custom property editor which is also in PDM. The folder is set to cache, about 165mb. We also cache our standard parts (fasteners, purchased parts) folder which is fairly large (850mb) but is needed if you want to drag them in from the design library. Once its cached, its quick after that.

This is exactly my response too down to the in-house custom property editor. We just duplicated all the file locations and templates for everything into pdm. Our users don’t have any local paths in their File Location settings.

[IndianaDave]

Wow... So good to see others (sad to see, actually) having similar issues as us.
We've been on SW2020 with PDP Standard for almost a year, and still haven't gotten it mastered.
Seeing a lot of similar issues as many of you.
And like you all, things are just to inconsistent, and convoluted to make it easy to track down.

[SPerman]

We are just now getting setup to use PDM. Initially I had my part templates inside of PDM, but on at least one computer, solidworks can never find the templates. I've updated the default templates, I've updated the file location (although both were correct to begin with.) The only way I could get this error to go away was to move the files outside of PDM. Maybe there is some setting somewhere that is incorrect, but if so I can't find it.

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[bnemec]

We are just now getting setup to use PDM. Initially I had my part templates inside of PDM, but on at least one computer, solidworks can never find the templates. I've updated the default templates, I've updated the file location (although both were correct to begin with.) The only way I could get this error to go away was to move the files outside of PDM. Maybe there is some setting somewhere that is incorrect, but if so I can't find it.

image.png

Sorry to be Capt. Obvious, but does the user have permissions to access to the templates and are they cached locally? We had SW revert back to installation directory over and over because the files were not cached for one reason or another. It's my perception that there's nothing in SW that is aware of PDM outside the reach of the PDM Add-in.

Changing the settings for user/group to update the /Vault/Templates folder on login helps a lot. Took me a while to learn that just because I can see the file in vault view doesn't mean that it's been cached. This causes problems when something tried to access the file but not through an open file dialog or vault view (file explorer), templates or forming tool files may be examples of this.
Remember there's a few places to grant user permission to view files, Workflow and Folder to start with.
Oh, and make sure the user is in the group if you're using group for permissions. Depending on how new users are added to the vault they may not have been added to the group.

Just mentioning the things that I learned the slow/hard way, hopefully you stepped right over these little pitfalls.

[AlexB]

We are just now getting setup to use PDM. Initially I had my part templates inside of PDM, but on at least one computer, solidworks can never find the templates. I've updated the default templates, I've updated the file location (although both were correct to begin with.) The only way I could get this error to go away was to move the files outside of PDM. Maybe there is some setting somewhere that is incorrect, but if so I can't find it.

image.png

That sounds like the path on this tab of the settings is incorrect.

As @bnemec mentioned, if this path is actually correctly pointing to your vault template folder, then the user may not have them cached locally yet. If that is the case, the setting shown in the next image is the one you need to add to your user or group for the folder that contains the templates.

[JSculley]

We are just now getting setup to use PDM. Initially I had my part templates inside of PDM, but on at least one computer, solidworks can never find the templates. I've updated the default templates, I've updated the file location (although both were correct to begin with.) The only way I could get this error to go away was to move the files outside of PDM. Maybe there is some setting somewhere that is incorrect, but if so I can't find it.

image.png

Sounds like a permissions problem, or there was no copy of the templates in the local cache.

[SPerman]

I think a permissions problem may be at the root of this. Thanks to those who pointed me in that direction.

(In the folder for the vault I had permission to do everything but modify. Fixing that appears to have solved the problem, but I haven't fully tested it yet.)

[the_h4mmer]

Sorry to resurrect and old thread (trying not to make it a habit, but there's lots of old threads I want to contribute to).

I've saved our templates to a PDM location and don't have any issues with access, but I do have the full PDM vault (not very big) refreshing on login for CAD users (our office occasionally loses power, a few times a year, so it's ideal to have this). The only thing I had difficulty with storing in the vault was the property tab builder, but my work around was to save it into the vault, then setup a schedules robocopy from the vault to the local Solidworks folder where it likes to look for the Property Tab builder files (off the top of my head I can't recall the location, but somewhere in Program Files or Program Data), so that even when there's an update to the vault files, it gets replicated on the local user's machine.

With respect to fasteners and the like, I introduced an off-the-shelf workflow to keep these items separated from designs that need to be reviewed. This is because previously, every bolt, nut, and washer was being 'reviewed' with a custom company drawing made (talk about a waste of time!).

@CarrieIves how's your PDM implementation been (now about a year later)?

[CarrieIves]

@the_h4mmer - We are still waiting for a server upgrade to be able to install PDM. Our company got purchased last summer, which delayed some things and changed the process for a lot of others. At the rate we are going, I hope I took good notes on what we planned to do so I can revisit them when we finally have a server that can run PDM.

[PCObelcz]

We store all templates in PDM. The folder is set to cache on login so the user has the latest version. Even if the user loses connection, they should be able to operate in PDM offline mode since the files are cached. @bnemec Not sure what's happening in your case, we've been operating this way for many years.

We also have the materials db in PDM. Users aren't supposed to edit it, only our librarians who know it needs to be checked out before edit.

In 2 previous lives we did it in this manor and had no issues.