This might sound like an odd question, but I was burned bysomething a few monts ago, changed my dimension method, and nowcan't reproduce original problem. Let me explain...

I've been using SolidWorks regularly for under one year now, somaybe I am asking something obvious, but I've witnessed weirdbehavior with dimensioning that I want to clear up. Maybe someonecan clear this up for me. There are two ways to dimension arectangle...click a line and place a dimension (length of side) orpick two lines and place a dimension (distance between paralellsides). Recently I dimensioned a rectangle using the first methodand got burned by later adding a fillet and the fillet actuallyincreased the length of the original feature. It appeared thatSolidWorks maintained the length of the line (as I defined) andadded material to the length of the rectangle to allow for thefillet.

I'm bringing this up because I instantly changed my dimensioning toreflect the dimension between parallel sides to avoid this, but inthe SolidProfessor courses I am taking, they use the single linedimension and it makes me wonder what I did wrong because I can'timagine someone teaching something that would be bad practice.Well, I can imagine, but you know what I mean.

To straighten this out, I dimensioned a rectangle the simple wayand added a fillet with no unusual result. I expected to have aproblem like I described earlier, but everything worked asexpected...the rectangle didn't grow due to the fillet.

So, now I am trying to figure out what I could have done wrong, andto see if anyone has been burned by dimensioning line length asopposed to distance between sides.

Any ideas what I might have done? What do you guys do? Maybebecause I was new I didn't have the proper rectange with all therelations to avoid this behavior? Does this even make sense?SolidworksSketching