Can anyone duplicate this?

Open an assembly, open a sheetmetal part, create a drawing of the sheetmetal
part, insert a front view of the folded sheetmetal part. Now insert a flat
pattern of the sheetmetal part. On our two seats here SolidWorks seems to
hang without the view being placed. The pointer still moves but there is no
view attached to it. Now if we do the 3 finger salute and click on task
manager the view is attached to the pointer as expected. I was thinking it
was just our installs being hosed up but when I was telling a customer of
ours how to place a flatpattern he experienced the same thing and lo &
behold he had an assembly open. If no assembly or drawing of an assembly is
open then the flat pattern placement works normally. I mentioned this to
our VAR AE and he could not duplicate it. We are running SP 3.4 on Window
2000 Pro. Maybe it's an OS problem, can someone try it on XP?

BTW - we discovered the 3 finger salute solution by accident when I thought
that SolidWorks was just locked up.

Let us know,
Thanks
Jeff

 

Are your parts by any chance read only? When you do this, SW is
creating a flat pattern configuration in the background and needs to
write to the file.

 

When I do a properties on the sldprt file in explorer the read only box is
not checked..

 

What about when you open the file, does the top bar of SolidWorks window
say Read Only after the name of the file?

 

No, not on the part, assembly or drawing files

I also checked the template files that I use and none of them are set as
read only either

Thanks for the ideas, these were things I hadn't thought of.

Jeff

 

Matt,
As I said you got me thinking. I had supplied our part templates for
sheetmetal parts to the customer that has the same problem. With this in
mind as being the only common thread between us and them, I created a
sheetmetal part just using the SW supplied part template. Guess what I can
insert a flat layout view with an assembly open. Now to discover what
happened to our templates.

Thanks for getting me to think outside of the box a bit.
Jeff

 

Progress report:

I was thinking maybe the template files were never converted to SW2006. And
I was right, but I converted a few and tried to duplicate the problem and
it's still there. I don't know where to go now. Any ideas out there?

Thanks in advance
Jeff

 

I would check the configuration settings. That's where it sounds like
it's getting hung up.

 

Don't see anything strange there, but I did just discover this: I don't
have to bring up the task manager, just activating another window (out of
SW) will do the same thing. Another clue?

 

What video card & driver are you running?

WT

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PNY Quadro FX 500, 6.1.7.6 ...Could this really be a video card issue when
a customer of ours has the same issue with different hardware? I take it
that you can't duplicate the problem. You did try it?

Thanks for the suggestion.

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Tried it and it seems to work fine here. But there are many methods of
doing each step that you describe and sometimes different methods produce
different results. You are correct that your video card should not produce
what you see, but if you were running some variety that I won't mention,
then I would question it - I have seen video cards and drivers produce all
kinds of issues that you wouldn't think would be related but turn out to be
a factor.

But here's something else to check. When you insert the flat pattern, have
you already created it or are you letting SW create it? The best way is to
let it create it at the point that you need it. But in doing that, you have
to wait a bit for that to happen. So when you go to insert a drawing view,
you pick flat pattern from the config box, and then when you take the cursor
out over the drawing, there may not be a view floating along with it because
it's still creating the flat pattern config of the model. Look at the
status bar at the lower LH corner to see if it's rebuilding. So try just
waiting a bit. Or insert the flat pattern view, and then go back and insert
another flat pattern view of that same model and see if it floats with it
immediately.

WT

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You're not editing in a part or subassembly context when this happens by
any chance, are you?

 

How about this setting:

Tools>Options>External References> Open referenced documents with
read-only access?

 

no

 

That setting is not checked.

I must have really tweaked your interest on this one. Or as I suspect
you're just a really nice guy trying to help out a fellow user, thank you
Matt.

Jeff