Went to a meeting last night of local users. They had a panel of about 5 guys talking about external links and how to give files to suppliers. One thing that came out of this is that majority of them were against external links. Kind of surprised in a way. We use external links here to setup our standards in our station's. Also use them when linking bolt holes together.
How many you us them?. Are they that bad??
Well said, Deepak.
At our company, we are almost completely forbidden for ever using External Links. Part of the problem is that our macro which assigns a serial number to each part and then saves it in our vault will not update the links correctly.
If your design intend includes design automation elements external links are necessary and may save a lot of time and money.
It would be great to hear their experiences of why not.
I would expect multiple external links from file to file can provide un-stable models if used incorrectly, I use external references in more of a direct line from one part to another and even that you do need to be careful.
For example here I use a Master Sketch for all of my designs primarily for the ease of parametric designs. There are times that I do have an interchangeable part that gets used in other assemblies and lets say if I drop part A into another assembly that has no connections to part A, except mating features, then if you were to edit any sketch or features in part A you'll see that there appears to be missing links. So when I need to edit the part A sketch I right click the sketch and select edit in context, then it would open up the assembly where it is connected as an external reference. I am used to that workflow, however it could be a nightmare down the road if someone oblivious to that workflow decides to edit that part and deletes those references.
With that in mind I can see where some would say that, but I'm not going to make each part separately and then mate them in an assembly file, I would have to open every part and edit each affected feature etc for every change, makes me really curious to hear their side of the story, seems like a missing link somewhere..
The good news is that you can turn them on and off, in bulk with #TASK. Artem Taturevych and his team solved this huge problem for all of us.
This is should be standard functionality in SOLIDWORKS: the ability to select multiple (or all) components in an assembly and lock or unlock their external references.
Opening them one by one and locking references manually is a huge task, next to impossible.
Alin Vargatu, can you elaborate on what you mean by "locking references manually"? I am not sure what this means and once I understand it, it may help me with my own design processes.
Picture to help you understand.
Thanks Deepak.
Also, I just found this (so I could have answered it myself, I suppose, but since I had never heard of it, I assumed that it wouldn't be in the help files....silly me )
Alin, can you tell me, (or point me to link) how to do this with #task? i assume you mean task schedular?
we are on SW 2014 here, and would love to do this in bulk. i just finished opening up files one at a time to lock all these files.
thank you!
Jim Donnellon wrote:
Alin, can you tell me, (or point me to link) how to do this with #task? i assume you mean task schedular?
we are on SW 2014 here, and would love to do this in bulk. i just finished opening up files one at a time to lock all these files.
thank you!
Sure, Jim.
1. Install and register #TASK.
2. Browse for macros
3. Search for "External"
4. Add "Lock/Unlock All External References" task to the Tasks List
5. Have fun!
As others have stated external links(references) are as only as good as the design. As stable as the design for that matter. Too many times I have seen external links blamed for piss poor design, if you open a part and over half of the drawings are undefined or under defined adding external references will make it worse.
When managed and controlled with an overall design intent in mind and a design plan they are very useful.The biggest issue I see is circular rebuilds from some of the people I work with. 2 pieces sharing holes and mates and everything is constantly needing to be re-built.
For anyone starting off I would suggest starting simple with a 10 piece assembly constructed top down to learn some basic principles of in context builds. See what works and what could cause some issues on bigger projects. Experience is what makes in context work or not.
Paul Risley - Great point
Circular Rebuilds and Missing External Links are a nemesis to great models, period...
Here whoever they had doing their design/modeling in the past would build most designs in context and then keep using them in other assemblies and keep adding configurations till the part from the first to last configuration was almost from a square to a ball and most times when a model/design was approved for production he deleted the assembly, because that was the end of the road for that product, now what. We don't trust any Assemblies & Parts of that era and the sad part was that was time down the drain, so yeah external links are a mess if there is no control.
So I will also challenge "New" SolidWorks users to set up your parametric models so that you can literally delete any item in the feature tree and there are "No" errors except possible missing mate errors from multiple parts required in the assembly, other then that it should be zero errors.
Once you conquer that approach to modeling there are no "Circular Rebuilds" and bad "External Links" ...
Well said Vladimir Urazhdin 100% dead on
I'll use them on initial design but I break them when putting files into PDM system.
my 2 cents
Steve C
For me External links are like children needing care. If not treated well they can create the mess. So they are both good and bad.
I use them where I think they are required/must.