Enterprise PDM is, no doubt, SolidWorks Corp’s flagship PDM package. This has been the case already for a few years. That being said, Workgroup PDM is not dead and remains a great data management solution for small to mid-sized companies. Savvy CAD managers will still want to use the Workgroup PDM API, and for that…
Read MoreCADSharp.com is proud to announce its upcoming SolidWorks API training webinars for the month of June, 2012, covering a range of important API topics. Please note that these times are not set in stone, and I am willing to change times or add more times depending on level of interest. Interested in attending a webinar?…
Read MoreFor those who don’t know, SolidSmack.com, the largest CAD/CAM blog in the world, recently ran an article on CADSharp.com in which I answered three questions about the SolidWorks API. The third question was perhaps the most insightul: “What advice do you have for aspiring API progammers?” This question is so important that I decided to…
Read MoreYou can’t talk about assemblies long without talking about mating. Consequently, if we’re going to automate assembly creation then we better have a darn good strategy for automating the mating process. While I can’t say that automating mating is easy, it is definitely possible. Best of all, several options are available to us to pull…
Read MoreDid you know that there are probably over 10,000 API calls available in SolidWorks? Yet less than 1% of them are necessary for creating even very complicated automation macros and add-ins. To prove this, I created a macro that would satisfy the specifications of a mock case study involving part, assembly, and drawing automation using only 99…
Read MoreDid you know that you can create completely custom features that behave just like regular SolidWorks features? This is possible with macro features. Just like a standard SolidWorks feature, macro features reside in the FeatureManager tree and can do anything a standard feature can do an more. Using a macro features you can do the…
Read MoreFundamental to writing macros and add-ins with the SolidWorks API is knowing how to get the pointer to a particular object. In some cases, this is a simple. If you need a selected object’s pointer then you just use ISelectionManager::GetSelectedObject6. If you need the name of a feature called “CutExtrude1” then you would just use…
Read MoreDownload the free PDF here If you’ve done any significant amount of programming with the SolidWorks API, no doubt you’ve run into compile or run-time errors. In my thousands of hours working with the API, here are the 23 I encounter the most: “Compile error: variable not defined” “Run-time error ’450?: Wrong number of arguments…
Read MoreYes, it’s true. You can create bodies “on-demand” without using features—using the SolidWorks API, of course. How does this magic happen? Enter in a rarely used but very powerful interface called IModeler. This interface contains no less than 30 members (not including obsolete members) for creating every kind of solid body, surface body, and curve…
Read MoreAt SolidWorks World 2012, I taught 30 API novices the following in a single hands-on session: How to use the macro recorder How to edit and clean up the recorded code How to declare, assign values to, and use variables How to research API calls in the API Help How to implement auto-completion in VBA…
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