Hello everyone,

I’ve frequented these boards for quite some time on various help topics, but today is my first time posting. I have been unable to find a solution to this issue after a good hour of searching. My colleagues and I are able to replicate this problem consistently.

In order to give you guys an idea to what exactly is happening, let me briefly take you through our design process, since our issue may be with our process and not necessarily the software.

Day one of a new project, we fire up SW and begin to design our parts. These parts are saved in a file path that looks like this:

P:\A3700+\A3716 PROJECT NAME\Drawings\Mechanical\WIP

Our top-level assemblies, sub-assemblies, part files, and drawings are all saved together in WIP. During the design process, parts and/or sub-assemblies may be discarded from the main assembly and replaced with something else. The old files are not deleted, just no longer in use.

Once we have finalized drawings, completed the project, and are ready for approval, we make a new folder inside our “Mechanical” folder on the same level as WIP called “FINAL”. We open our top-level assembly from the WIP folder, and pack and go it into our FINAL folder, making sure to bring the drawings of all the referenced components with.

Here’s where we run into an issue. The pack and go appears to do its job without error, however upon exploring the FINAL folder, the pack and go has transferred files that are not associated or linked (at least we believe) to the top-level assembly. To prove that these ‘dangling’ files are not linked or referenced, we open the top-level assembly in SW. Then we explore the FINAL folder, highlight all the files (except drawing files) and hit the delete key.

Doing so will issue a prompt indicating that active files cannot be deleted (The files currently in use and being referenced by the top-level assembly) however, it does delete the dangling files, indicating that they are in fact, not associated with the active file.

So the question is this; is our procedure causing the ‘dangling’ files to be pack and go’ed with our top-level assembly, or is there something we are overlooking to prevent it from taking unassociated files?

Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to be as thorough and detailed as possible.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Steven