Blog SOLIDWORKS looking good with Toolbox 2010
So how good is the SOLIDWORKS 2010 toolbox integration?
Is it possible that they finally have it right? Yeah, maybe…2010 has some huge improvements over old grandpa 2009.
[For my Enterprise PDM friends, you’ve certainly heard from many people talking about we no longer the issue with remote locations trying to access the single Microsoft Access file. Fixing that issue is crazy huge. Replication of your toolbox to multiple sites is now possible.]
We’ve all always had the issue of what happens when you open an assembly with toolbox fasteners that are not part of your toolbox. Today I ran this little experiment.
- I created a new assembly and added a SHCS that I received from a customer to this assembly. For this fastener, I chose a configuration that was not in my toolbox’s SHCS
- Saved and closed both files
- Opened the assembly
- SOLIDWORKS recognized that the assembly had the SHCS at a different configuration than what was already in my toolbox and it asked to create the configuration in my toolbox part
- I answered yes
- Now the assembly referenced MY toolbox part. My toolbox part now contains the new configuration. [Pretty cool! So I continued:]
- In the assembly I manually swapped back my toolbox fastener, with the original fastener
- Saved/Closed the assembly
- Opened the assembly
- SOLIDWORKS automatically replaced the SHCS’s file path to my toolbox path, without asking me anything.
Looks like SOLIDWORKS and the Toolbox are working hard to ensure you are always looking at fasteners from YOUR toolbox, not fasteners from external directories. As Martha Stewart says, “This is a good thing.”