Idea for an enhancement request?
Idea for an enhancement request?
(OP)
I often run into problems when making major revisions to assemblies, finding it difficult to understand quickly which mates are doing what. Sometimes it seems easier just to delete ALL of the mates and start from scratch. I am aware of some/most of the tricks to see which mates pertain to which part (ie: View Mates, View Dependencies, renaming mates, etc.) but they seem to only help marginally. What if there was a tool that when you tried to drag a part in a particular direction, SW would point out to you which mates were preventing the movement instead of just telling you that the "...component is fully defined..." What do you think? Would something like this work?






RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
Ray Reynolds
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
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Have you read FAQ731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
I believe you can already put the mates into folders and rename them. At least you can in SW2004. Not sure that you can force the renaming though.
mncad
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
Timelord
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
Go ahead and put your enhancement request.
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
It also helps when creating Equations & DT's. See FAQ559-590
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
Regards,
Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.3dvisiontech.com
http://www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
Your wish is SW's command.
This feature already exists in SW04. Upon creation of a mate, it's system generated name is highlighted in the "Mate Dialogue Box" ready for renaming "on-the-fly". It remains highlighted until it is renamed or accepted (by clicking on the green check mark) or by starting another mate selection.
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
In the feature manager tree, going down one level, you can easely access a folder with all the mates related to that particular part/subassembly (if you have "view features" selected) or you can have imediatly all mates if you have "view mates and dependencies" selected. I suppose this will help.
Renaming is an art on itself. You must take great care for the names you are choosing. They must be very simple and they should be objectively connected to features or mates so they can be easely identified by another user.
From my experience (for many years I was against changing names, now I am against not changing them) renaming features and mates will help a lot understand the modeling sequence and intent. Editing a model created by someone else or a long time ago will be an easy task. But if you don't create meaningfull simple names, well then maybe it's better not cahnging them at all.
Regards
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
Don’t hold your breath for more. Suppressing items is quick and will show the general area to suppress individual mates. We have assemblies that are older and it is quicker to do it over than fix the old.
I will spend several hours a week fighting with this problem. Today I could not open a drawing until I closed 16 files, reloaded SolidWorks and opened the file through Explorer. This file was last opened in 2001, and took 10 minutes to open and resume working with the rest of the assembly and drawing pages.
I find working with older assemblies and drawing a real pain.
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
As many problems as you seem to have. Have you tried making a new profile to see if that helps some of your issues?
Regards,
Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.3dvisiontech.com
http://www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
As to mate problems. If there are more than 10 parts in an assembly that have mate problems, take several and create a new subassembly with some and see if you can isolate the problem mates in the subassemblies. Now days we try to limit any one assembly to 20 pieces, maybe 50 if there are a lot of fasteners, so debugging is quicker. The added benefit is faster production of the next iteration. Some of our designs may be changed 5 or 10 times to meet new requirements, just by modifying 1 or 2 subassemblies. This can also speed up making production drawings.
RE: Idea for an enhancement request?
I always convert all the files to a newer version. I think that the conversion wizard pretty robust and it can be left working for the night. Files with errors will be skipped. This way there's no resource waste to do the conversion.
There's always half a dozen of files that, for one reason or another, where not successfuly converted. Normaly this will take less than one hour to correct.
The conversion is made on a copy of the database. The new files are used after some tests. A backup of the original databese is saved (we never know what can happen!)
Regards