Custom material properties

Today I had the pleasure of doing a fake interview with Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks.

Engineering Data Specialist Man: Thanks for “being” with us today.

JR: The pleasure is all mine. It is not very often I get to talk to one of the best SOLIDWORKS users of all time -you’re in the top four I believe?.

EDSM: Jeff, I have been wanting to ask you about the new ability in SOLIDWORKS 2009 to add custom properties to materials in the SOLIDWORKS materials database. Is there any way to access this information other than reading the XML file through programming? I think it would be super cool if you could take this information…

JR: Excuse, sorry to interrupt, is that a picture of Celine Dion on your wall?

EDSM: ….as I was saying: If we had a way to get this custom material property information into the FILE custom properties it would be extremely valuable! Think of the benefits! The vendor of a material could automatically appear on the BOM; -or now that we can put equations in our file properties, with a “price per pound” material property we could automatically have the cost of the raw material of a part!

JR: Yes, it is true. Without API, putting data in that new custom tab has little more value than giving you practice on your data entry skills. Your ideas sounds like a great enhancement requests don’t they?