Is it a Part... or a Toolbox Part?

I was recently talking with one of our customer’s that designs fixtures and related equipment.  Fortunately, this customer is using SOLIDWORKS Professional and has SOLIDWORKS Toolbox for fasteners and hardware to make his life easier!  His dilemma was he no longer wanted to have the Toolbox components of his assembly identified as Toolbox components.  He wanted a group of fasteners that originated as Toolbox parts to be treated as normal parts.

What I found interesting is that a Toolbox part is identified by an internal flag in the file that makes it just that – a Toolbox part.  Even better is that the flag can be turned off!  This is accomplished by using a utility called ‘Set Document Property’.  You can find this tool in your SOLIDWORKS installation folder under the “Toolboxdata utilities” subfolder – named “sldsetdocprop.exe”.  Browse to this folder location, double-click on the file to run it. Once the ‘Set Document Property’ utility is running, the process is simple.

1.  The Toolbox file(s) should be saved in a location outside of the Toolbox folder on your hard drive. Then close your assembly and related SOLIDWORKS part files. This is to allow the utility write access to the file(s).
2.  Click on the ‘Add Files…’ button and browse to the location of the Toolbox part(s).
3.  Change the ‘Property State: Yes’ radio button to ‘Property state: No’.
4.  Click on ‘Update Status’.
5.  Click ‘Close’.

Now when you re-open the assembly, your Toolbox icon in the Assembly Feature Tree has changed to a normal part icon.  Also, after a bit more research, I discovered that turning off this flag is one method of allowing a PDM system, like WorkGroup PDM, to check in your part into the vault when the WPDM options are set to not check in Toolbox parts.
, Is it a Part… or a Toolbox Part?

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