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Detached Drawings

Detached Drawings

Detached Drawings

(OP)
Anyone have any thoughts to offer on detached drawings?  Good? Bad? use only when ? be careful ?  anything?

RE: Detached Drawings

It depends upon what you are intending to use them for.
Revision tracking, Customer approval, Purchasing, ???
They are excellent when used for the right thing and terrible when used for the wrong one.

My preference is to use eDrawings.

RE: Detached Drawings

(OP)
Well, some people at my company like to use them on larger files, claiming better performance.  Ive stayed away from them in that instance as I havent been formally introduced to the detached dwgs and the fact that they are "temporarily" (if I understand correctly) "disconnected" from the model scares me.  But your excellent/terrible verdict is what I figured and wondered what the excellent and terrible uses were.


Thanks,
Mike

RE: Detached Drawings

I have had some customers with email filters that would not allow the eDrawings with exe extensions through (although substitution of the exe with _xe works). Some people are not eager to download the eDrawings freeware. That takes away a nice SW feature. For those situations a detached drawing will work but a pdf will do the job with a smaller file.

I have worked on projects where there are common assembly or part files being used that are not from a shared network. When an updated drawing is ready, a detached drawing can be sent to another location and the supporting assembly/part files can be reattached or not.

Harold
SW2007 SP4.0 OPW2007 SP1.0
www.lumenflow.com

RE: Detached Drawings

(OP)
I just looked up in SW help to see how they describe the purpose (I guess I should have done that before, just seems like help is often very skeletal at best).  But using that and all of your comments, I think I understand a little better now  how we can use them.  I would love to hear more examples though of great uses and not-so-great uses (especially the disastrous ones)

Thanks everyone,
Mike

RE: Detached Drawings

A 'disastrous' (well, negative anyway) result might be creating a detached drawing for revision control, and then having someone re-attach the drawings after the parts have been updated. The revision history would then be lost.

RE: Detached Drawings

All our drawings are stored as detached drawings, and our templates are setup that way so all new drawings are detached. This was done years ago when it was called rapidraft and you couldn't switch back and forth.

So why do we do this? Two reasons really and one no longer applies. You used to be able to open detached drawings save out to dwg/dxf without loading the model. This was helpful for our tech pub department that needed to convert our large assemblies to dxf format for use in the manuals they created. Saved them a lot of wait time as they didn't have to wait for the assembly to load, plus their computer were't really powerful enough to open a large assy. Some past version made it automatically load when saving to dxf so that no longer works.

The primary reason now is for large assembly drawings. We can open them, add notes and dimensions without loading the assembly......much quicker. So why create all drawings that way? It was just a decision we made.....that way, any drawing could be opened without loading the model and no one would have to think about saving them out that way.

So what's the down side? Larger files for one. Maybe some cases of people not loading the model when they should. Some some graphical glitches like bendlines on sheetmetal drawings not showing up sometimes.

If had to do it over, I may opt to not save them as detached. Also keep in mind that this decision was made 7 years ago and computers and networks were much slower then so the benefit is not as great as it used to be. Though we still have large assemblies that take several minutes to open where as the drawing will open in 10-30 seconds.

Personally I like to see them maybe combine the two options.....maybe load the model by default but give the option to not load the model (prompt if the file is large). Its the opposite now.

Some of the light weight enhancements added in the past few releases have also reduced the advantages detached drawings had.

Jason

SolidWorks 2007 SP5.0
SolidWorks 2008 SP0.1
WinXp sp2 (32 and 64 bit)

RE: Detached Drawings

(OP)
Thanks, that is great stuff for what I am looking for.

Helps 2000 lbs.

Mike

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