5 Replies Latest reply on Jan 29, 2014 5:30 PM by Jerry Steiger

    Overwritten Parts in an Assembly

    Jonas Forster
    Jonas Forster Jan 28, 2014 1:05 PM

      Apperently, when creating a new part in an assembly, a surpressed part in a Folder with an identical default name is overwritten.


      I was building an assemby, and creating parts in it. I had to create 2 different versions of an attachment, which attached to the same connector. I created the first attachment, with many of the parts being left with their default name (part1 in assembly1). Having finished one attachment, I surpressed it and continued working on the second, with again many of the new parts being given default names. After about a days work I surpressed attachment 2 and unsurpressed attachment 1.

      Apperently, when creating a new part in an assembly, a surpressed part in a Folder with an identical default name is overwritten!!!!!!!!! Solidworks displayed an error, saying the surpressed part was not the same as a currently loaded part, but it would not load my original parts, instead overwrote them with the new parts, as seen in the Picture.

      How do I get my original parts back? This was a days work, so there is no EPDM backup, only a saved assembly which produces a conflict when i try to unsurpress.

      This is a definite bug.

      • 1123 Views
      • Categories: Assembly
      • Tags:
        • Re: Overwritten Parts in an Assembly
          Glenn Schroeder
          Glenn Schroeder Jan 28, 2014 1:40 PM (in response to Jonas Forster)

          Welcome to the forum.  I'm not sure I understand.  So you had more than one virtual part in an assembly with the same name?  If so, I'm not surprised it blew up.  Using the same name for more than one part is never a good idea.  If that's not what happened, please explain further.

          • Re: Overwritten Parts in an Assembly
            Stephen Bittner
            Stephen Bittner Jan 28, 2014 2:56 PM (in response to Jonas Forster)

            If you still have the files that you really want, you can always use the "replace" feature via SolidWorks Explorer.  However, if you overwrite any file with a new file, the old file is gone....it's always worked that way, yeah?  Lesson learned.....be very careful with naming conventions.  I would guess that most new Solidworks users have gone through a similar scenario with files being overwritten and wasting time/effort. 

            • Re: Overwritten Parts in an Assembly
              Walter Fetsch
              Walter Fetsch Jan 28, 2014 8:01 PM (in response to Jonas Forster)

              I'm not completely clear on the scenario, but if you have two parts in the same assembly, that have the same name, they're two instances of the same part.  If you suppress one and work on the other, you're still working on both parts because two parts with the same name are the same part.  I don't know if that clarifies the situation or not.  Perhaps you could clarify what happened.

               

              Also, if you have Auto-recover running, you could have a backup of the file you lost.  It might be worth a look.

              • Re: Overwritten Parts in an Assembly
                Jonas Forster
                Jonas Forster Jan 29, 2014 4:11 AM (in response to Jonas Forster)

                Thanks for the clarification. What peeved me was that I didn't rename any parts in the assembly. That was actually the problem, I never renamed any Parts, and Solidworks assigned a default name twice.

                 

                More precisely, [create new Part] created "Part5^Assembly1". Then I moved the Part5 into a Folder, surpressed the Folder and moved a "Part4^Assembly1" lower down the assembly tree. Then [create new Part] created a new "Part5^Assembly1" which overwrote the old Part5.

                 

                Thanks for the tip with "replace" feature, sadly all parts were only saved in the assembly.

                Im chalking this up to lessons learned.

                  • Re: Overwritten Parts in an Assembly
                    Jerry Steiger
                    Jerry Steiger Jan 29, 2014 5:30 PM (in response to Jonas Forster)

                    Jonas,

                     

                    That is funny (peculiar, not humorous), that you got burned because SolidWorks reused a name. It seems like they almost never do that type of thing. In fact, people have complained about it in some other contexts. (If you add three copies of a part to an assembly, they get item numbers, so you would have items 1, 2, 3, and 4. If you delete item 4 and then later add another one, you end up with items 1, 2, 3, and 5.) Maybe they decided to listen to the customer and picked the wrong place to implement this reuse of names.

                     

                    Jerry S.