Design Table Problem

Howdee group,

I have an assembly for which the geometry of individual parts is
updated through design tables. The overall dimensions of the assembly
always change, so I've devised a system to automatically update the
parts as required: I use one "master" excel table to calculate the
overall geometry of the assembly and individual parts, and then run a
VB program which goes through all the parts to open each part's design
table in order to update/pass information from the master excel table
(when each design table is opened, it automatically updates from the
master table and thus the part is updated). This works pretty well,
except now I would like to make the parts generic so that one part can
be used for different assemblies (which would be defined by different
master tables).

The problem I now have is that the design tables of each of the parts
refer to the original master table I made for the first assembly. I
can replace the excel references in each part, but then I would need
to duplicate the parts for each new assembly design, and I would
rather just keep one version of each part.

Is there a way of creating some type of global variables which can (1)
be updated from excel, and then (2) read by a part's design table when
it is opened?

- I suppose this might be more of an excel than a SW question...

Thx a bunch.

 

Have you thought of controlling all your parts from 1 externally linked
design table? This is built in functionality. You could repoint the parts
to new externally linked tables fairly easily from within the parts or with
a simple VB script.

I may not completely understand the depth of what you have accomplished. It
seems that you are jumping through some unnesasary hoops.

Cadguru

 

Thanks for your reply Adam.

What you've describe is essentially what I do now (I just described it
in a bit more detail than maybe was necessary). I did make a VB
script to automatically re-point all the parts - essentially just a
search/replace of the path and filename for the external xls file.

I guess I was trying to think of a more "elegant" solution - the VB
script takes quite a while to update all the parts as there's a good
number of them and they are relatively complex. I still have to open
each part's design table before it updates anyway (VB script does that
too), so I suppose it doesn't take that much more time to for the
program do the string replace.

I'm curious how others might have approached this problem.

Cheers, David V.

 

I haven't tried this, but can you change Excels external links to point to a
different spreadsheet? I've done this manually but not through a program.
Might be worth a try.

Tony

 

Yes you can. This works well...

Dim ExcelSht As Worksheet
Set ExcelSht = ExcelObj2.ActiveSheet
retval = ExcelSht.Name
ExcelSht.Cells.Replace What:=findstring, _
Replacement:=replacestring, LookAt:=xlPart,
MatchCase:=False
Set ExcelSht = Nothing

David.