Hi all,
My organization is trying to cleanup our vault as it has gotten bogged down over the years. The main issue we're facing is that there are duplicates of parts, often due to someone remodeling a part that's already been modeled before. Luckily, everything has the proper part number in their description so we can keep track of what is what. Our goal is to get rid of duplicates so that there is only one of each part, rather than Part123 and Part123-1 both of which are the exact same thing.
Unfortunately, most of these duplicates each have assemblies they are used in. For example, Part123 may be used in 25 assemblies and Part123-1 may be used in 50 different assemblies. We want it so that there's only Part123 with 75 assemblies it's associated it. Now, we could go through and update the components in those 25 or 50 assemblies individually so that they use the part we want them to, but that takes time. To make matters worse, we're needing to do this for about 500 parts. You can do the math.
Is there by chance a tool out there that we can tell to swap out one component from a list of assemblies with another component? I realize mates are another issue, but that's less of a worry right now.
Thanks.
Sorry Brendan, it's a NOPE. File management is a huge issue, and when you have bad file management inside a file management tool like PDMW, it only gets more bizarre.
I do believe if you were to upgrade to Enterprise there are certain things they can do to manipulate the data, but not sure that is one of them.
You could export the whole vault to a location, than use SolidWorks explorer to do a replace, but that is not something I would recommend. Once the data is in there, manipulating the connections is not easy. PDMW is a flat file system, not a true database (as in sql), so it has limitations. It may just be better off to fix them 1 at a time.
I have the same issue, only with complex parts that aren't identical completely. Are you sure the parts are exactly the same??