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Assembly Configurations - Two Vitally Important Check Boxes

Thursday April 17, 2014 at 10:36am
Being on the support desk exposes you to many ways of applying different techniques in SOLIDWORKS.
 
While making changes between configurations, a customer was finding that mates were sometimes over defining the assembly, or that too many parts were appearing in certain configurations and not at all in others, leaving the models coming out looking a mess like this. 
 
 
The key here are the two Advanced Options found in the Configuration Property manager highlighted in red.
 
This menu can be accessed by selecting a particular configuration using the right mouse button and clicking on ‘Properties’ or when creating a new configuration.
 
‘Suppress new features and mates’ and ‘Suppress new components’ can sometimes be forgotten whilst creating a new configuration and can lead to working round and round in circles.
 
 
The reason for this is that without these two tick boxes selected any changes applied in another configurations will propagate through to the active one-  giving some unexpected results like we saw above, and when fixing the problems in this configuration it can cause the rest to falter too.
 
Whereas with these buttons selected, the configuration becomes ‘independent’ from changes applied to the rest- a useful trait that most users would want.
 
It is important to note that this option has to be applied to each configuration individually so it is important especially when editing other peoples designs that you first double check that these options are selected on every configuration before enacting any changes. A tip however is to select these options on the initial Default configuration, so that when you create new ones these inherit the checkboxes from the original.
 
By Chris Morrogh 
Applications Engineer
 

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