Bear with me as I try to explain this in text as well as ispossible.
We have a number of cabinets as multi-body parts with similarfeature names (Right Plane, Left Plane, Door Plane, etc). Each parthas its own external design table.
We would like to both read from, and write to those design tablesusing another external Excel file in the same folder as thecabinets. This would allow us to, say, drive the width of allinstances of laminate by entering it in the "master" Excel file, asthe DTs would be reading that cell for their thickness.Additionally, the "master" file could read generated BOM data fromsecondary sheets in the cabinet design tables (we would have towrite the equations in Excel that could interpet how many of eachitem is necessary for each type of cabinet).
We have thought this out to some extent, and realize there areissues:
-Copying and moving the cabinets and Excel files will cause Exceland SWX DT links to break or refer to previous locations (this canbe fixed with VB or VBA, in Windows/SolidWorks/Excel or by hand, ifnecessary).
-Pack and Go is unpredictable at best, and we have numerous SPRsfor its failures to zip, find associated DTs and change referencesto renamed DTs.
-One must be careful when they modify the DTs, as they aren'talways available to one another, depending on if they're in Windowsor SolidWorks' memory.
-Finally, as a programmer and as SolidWorks user, this is ahack. Every designer (software or otherwise) should have aninternal "twitch" when they realize they're making something toocomplicated and need to find another method.
We know how to handle all of those problems, but they require a lotof attention when setting up a new set of cabinets, and writingsome code to fix erroneous links after a move/copy.
Which leads me to ask:
Outside of writing custom software (do-able in-house, butexpensive), is there any easier way of doing this? Even our VARadmitted that they couldn't think of anything better. I find ithard to believe that we're pushing the limits of SWX designingthings like cabinets.
I hope I've explained that well enough. Please let me know if Ineed to elaborate, etc.
ThanksSolidworksConfigurations design Tables
We have a number of cabinets as multi-body parts with similarfeature names (Right Plane, Left Plane, Door Plane, etc). Each parthas its own external design table.
We would like to both read from, and write to those design tablesusing another external Excel file in the same folder as thecabinets. This would allow us to, say, drive the width of allinstances of laminate by entering it in the "master" Excel file, asthe DTs would be reading that cell for their thickness.Additionally, the "master" file could read generated BOM data fromsecondary sheets in the cabinet design tables (we would have towrite the equations in Excel that could interpet how many of eachitem is necessary for each type of cabinet).
We have thought this out to some extent, and realize there areissues:
-Copying and moving the cabinets and Excel files will cause Exceland SWX DT links to break or refer to previous locations (this canbe fixed with VB or VBA, in Windows/SolidWorks/Excel or by hand, ifnecessary).
-Pack and Go is unpredictable at best, and we have numerous SPRsfor its failures to zip, find associated DTs and change referencesto renamed DTs.
-One must be careful when they modify the DTs, as they aren'talways available to one another, depending on if they're in Windowsor SolidWorks' memory.
-Finally, as a programmer and as SolidWorks user, this is ahack. Every designer (software or otherwise) should have aninternal "twitch" when they realize they're making something toocomplicated and need to find another method.
We know how to handle all of those problems, but they require a lotof attention when setting up a new set of cabinets, and writingsome code to fix erroneous links after a move/copy.
Which leads me to ask:
Outside of writing custom software (do-able in-house, butexpensive), is there any easier way of doing this? Even our VARadmitted that they couldn't think of anything better. I find ithard to believe that we're pushing the limits of SWX designingthings like cabinets.
I hope I've explained that well enough. Please let me know if Ineed to elaborate, etc.
ThanksSolidworksConfigurations design Tables
