I have an assembly which required a number of different drawings in order to get all the dimensions in a comprehensible manner — that is, I needed to hide some parts of the assembly, create a drawing, then unhide those parts and hide others, and create another drawing. I saved the drawings as I went along and printed them out. Later, I went to open the drawings and was astonished to find that my drawings were lacking parts. I came to realize that as I went along, hiding and unhiding parts in the assembly, the drawings were updating their views to reflect the assembly and its hidden parts. This meant that by the time I finished my set of drawings, by which point I had hidden the initial parts, those first drawings now had no parts in them (although the dimensions persisted).

Is there a way to force SolidWorks not to do this? Or break the dependency? This seems completely stupid: if I make a drawing for a particular part, I want that part to always be visible even if I've hidden that part in the assembly. Why would the drawing be dependent on the assembly in this manner? What use is a drawing to me if I have to constantly open the assembly, "unhide" everything in the assembly, then reload the drawing? I find myself hiding and unhiding parts in the assembly as a way to focus on certain features and derive relationships between parts while setting up parts on machines.