File Management - Assembly Revision Management 

SolidWorks provides some powerful tools which allow assemblies and drawings to maintain fully associative references to their component model files. Assemblies need to reference parts or sub-assemblies and drawings need to reference the parts or assemblies which make up the drawing views on the sheet. As the referenced documents evolve throughout the design cycle, managing these references is extremely important.

Let us set up an example where a user needs to update his assembly to the latest revisions of the components of his assembly. The following assumptions are made:

• The assembly currently references the parts in folder F1. The latest revisions of these components are actually stored in the folder F2.

• The old parts were named part1_X1.sldprt and part2_X1.sldprt. The revision suffix in the revised components names has changed from X1 to X2.

With those assumptions in mind, here are the steps needed to update the assembly to the revised part files in the new directory.

1.  In SolidWorks, select File, Open and pick the assembly. Then click the References button.

In the Edit Referenced File Locations dialog box which now appears, click Select All to check all of the components listed in the dialog. At this time, you can see that all files are selected, the directory path still points to F1, and the revision number for the part files is still X1.

File Management - Reusing Existing Parts and Drawings

A user has a drawing, D1, and a part, P1. The user needs to create a part, P2, that is very similar to P1 and later detail the new part, P2. Since the part is very similar, both the original drawing and part, D1 and P1, can be used to create the new combination, D2 and P2. In other words, both the new drawing, D2, and the new part, P2, will be created in this one operation. To accomplish this goal, do the following:

1. Open the original drawing, D1.

2. Perform File, Save As, and enter the filename D2. Then select the References button.

3.  In the New Pathname column, double click on the listing for P1 to activate the editing of the path name. Edit the listing and change P1 to P2. If you want to save P2 in a folder different from that of P1, use the New Folder list box to browse for the new folder.

4. Click OK to the Edit Referenced File Locations dialog and Save in the Save As dialog. D2 can be saved in a different directory from that of D1 as well.

SolidWorks will create a new drawing, D2, that points to a new part, P2. So, you get both a head start in the creation of the similar part and also in the creation of the detail drawing of the model. There will be no files provided with this example since the actual design of the files is not needed to understand the process.

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