Configurations are a powerful tool but don’t play well with PDM.

You know how we have the Freeze bar to lock features. And it come up with the little lock icon.

What if you could right click on a configuration and lock it.

I’m thinking that solidworks would pull the Freeze bar all the way down for the just locked configurations freezing them.

If you tried to change a dimension that would affect any of the locked configurations an error widow would pop up saying

“changing this dimension is not allowed because it would affect locked configurations”.

Maybe even asking would you like to make this dimension “for this configuration only”

Seams like to me it wound not be that hard for them to set some internal flags that if you tried to change and dimension that was set to “all configurations” and there was locked configurations the error widow would pop up.

Now the icing on the cake would be to be able to check in and out configurations to the valt.

And the whip cream in top would be able to lock configurations in assemblies.

For the cherry on top when you locked a configuration in a assembly would lock all the configurations of the parts in those assemblies.

Really going out on limb if you checked in a drawing it locked the configurations used in the drawing and if there are assemblies and it locked the parts like I said above.

NOW  ALL THE PROBLEMS BECAUSE THE DRAWINGS ARE MODEL DRIVEN GO AWAY. 

  Just think how many problems this would fix and bring back the power of the configuration!