Greetings,

I'm a beginning SolidWorks user.  It is my understandingthatincluding a revision letter or number in the file namesofSolidWorks parts, assemblies, and drawings utterly defeats thefilemanagement capability of the PDMWorks vault.  One ofmycoworkers just made some changes to an existing part and saveditwith a new file name that incremented the revision letter from AtoB.  He couldn't understand why the changes he just madewerenot updated in the drawing.  I explained to him thathisdrawing was still linked to the part with the revision Afilename.

After persuading this coworker not to include revisionletters infile names, he sent some files to our machine shop, whopromptlyhowled that there were no revision letters in the filenames. Apparently the software used by our machine shop willnotoverwrite an old file with a newer one if the file namesareidentical.  Most of our machine shop's customer useSolidWorksand include revision letters in the names of the part anddrawingfiles.  Hawk Ridge Systems suggested creating copiesofdeliverable vault files and appending the revision informationtothe file name before sending them out.  What's going onhere? Are you folks including revision letters in yourSolidWorksfile names and not using the vault?  Or are youappendingrevision information to file names only when they are sentoutsidethe company?

Thank you, Jeff PhilipsSolidworksWorkgroup Pdm