Custom Properties

Hello All,

I'm completely self taught in SW and have never had the occasion to use
custom properties.
Are there any books on the subject or that cover the subject.
Or could someone give me a very basic do this, this, and this, I would be
grateful.
What I'm looking for is a way to set up some custom properties in my
drawings, like material for one.

TIA,
Muggs

 

Google : custom properties solidworks

That's a good way to start with, then for example
www.markkulehtola.net/swit.html

 

One observation that I have made about Custom Properties is that they are
MicroSoft Technology grafted onto SW. In other words, the documents
properties you have available in Excel, Word, Access, etc. are the same
that are available in SW. They can be accessed using Windows Explorer, SW
Explorer or within SW.

Markku has also weighed in on SWIT, his Custom Property manager. One of the
practices he uses, which I think is quite good, is to only use
Configuration Specific Custom Properties.

Now as for documentation, SW does a really good job of documentation for
Custom Properties.

1. The help on custom properties.
2. The help on design tables (since these can manipulate custom properties)
3. The API help (if you want to know what can and can't be programatically
controlled.
4. The properties.txt file in the SW install directory.
5. The TOOLS/OPTIONS/FILES LOCATIONS tab.
6. Various items for subscription customers on the SW web site
6a. Knowledge base
6b. API programming examples
6c. The SW gallery
7. Experimentation/Verification. I try not to use anything in SW until I
have verified that it works as expected.

When you exhaust these maybe there is a book on this subject, but I haven't
found it.

 

One observation that I have made about Custom Properties is that
....

These can be 2 different animals here, "Document'" properties and
"Custom" properties.


The document level properties are to a generic Miscrosoft standard,
and can be seen with explorer, but the custom properties only seem to
be defined by a binary format (typelib). For instance, there are
specialty Excel properties that do not show up in Explorer, not just
the ones from SWX.

 

I did a little testing. All the custom properties I defined in SW
showed up in Explorer (MyComputer), but not while SW was running.
Apparently, when SW is running and a document is loaded the Custom
Properties tab in Explorer is absent. I didn't try configuration
specific custom properties.

 

When a file is locked by a process, the properties are not accessable. This
can also occur when Solidworks exists and does not release the file. This
does not just apply to SW.

Tony N