find all drawings that relate to parts/assy in a top assembly

Hello,

I have a problem I can't find a solution for. I am designing (not
writing) a simple application that will translates all files in an
assembly into pdf (if drawings) and STEP (if part or assembly
document). All this, by using Solidworks (not PDM Workgroup or
anything else).

Say that I have an assembly on 3 levels, 100 parts total, and 50
drawings. I need to create a dialog bix with a table that include all
these files, showing what drawing relates to what part/assy. Pretty
much like what you get when invoking Pack and Go.

How do I know which drawings relate to what part/assembly so I can
save all of them as pdf programmatically?

Thank you for your help
-Donato

 

If you look in API help you will find by searching the word "traverse"
several examples of how to traverse the feature tree in an assembly. When
you retrieve each feature in the assembly you can check what it is and
output accordingly.

Finding all the drawings is a little different because a drawing is not
referenced by its parents. I think SW now has an API that will do this
for you without even having SW open. I can't think of what it is called
off the top of my head. Documnent Manager comes to mind.

SW Explorer also will find drawings related to assemblies.

If you wanted to find drawings by brute force you could use the
filesystem object to find slddrw files and then do some checks on them.

If you use this method you can open SW in the background and not have the
files displayed because you are just checking them. That saves a lot of
overhead.

TOP

 

You may want to use the SolidWorks Document Manager (SWDM) object for
this. You will need to contact SW to get a key.

Where-used via SWDM can be very slow, as it actually searches through
files in all specified locations.