Have just come across a particularly strange problem with a small assembly in one of our larger design files.
When opening the top level assembly I noticed that a small bracket and card guide assembly was not displaying despite all parts being set to visible.
In the feature tree for the assembly I expanded the sub assembly in question to find that it no longer contained any parts:
Moving on from this I navigated to the assembly within windows explorer and opened the file.
The assembly displays in Solidworks for a nano second then all parts vanish and the feature tree is empty:
Is there any technical explanation for how this has happened and how/if it can be resolved?
--I'm ruling out the files being deleted as the assembly was last saved over a year ago and am assuming that if the files had been deleted they wouldn't briefly display when opening the file.--
If this particular assembly was being used as a sub-assembly and a user deleted all the parts from the sub assembly as it sat inside the main assemlby and saved it, they will be gone.
This is a change from past releases where deleting a part in a sub-assembly will delete the whole assembly, not just the parts inside.
This is a particularly EVIL setup that has burned me many times. I've actually deleted parts in this very way and surprised myself later.
I really wish SW would give a pop up window asking if you really mean to delete the subs parts or the whole sub before it zaps them.
I don't know if this is what happend to you, but it's happened to me.