We are using SW2007 with SP4.0.

We are exporting a series of SW drawings to AutoCAD for a customer. In some of the *.dwg drawings - opened in AutoCAD - views are missing. The dimensions are there, but there are no drawing entities (lines, arcs, etc.).

We noticed in one of the files the view in question had been placed on a layer in the SW drawing. We don't make a practice of placing views on layer, but this one inadvertently was.

Does anyone know if this is a limitation/bug that SW will not export correctly if the view is on anything but the None layer?

Now we get to open and sift through hundreds of drawings to figure out which ones exported correctly and which ones are junk.

-dch

UPDATE:

We shut down the whole office and put everyone on this task. The boss loved that!

We opened every exported *.dwg folder and looked for missing views. We renamed the problem files. Then we returned to SolidWorks and opened the drawing files that had produced the bad exports. We re-exported and checked each export as it was done. We got several additional bad exports.

We finally determined that if we changed the AutoCAD output Version between 2000-2002 and 2004-2006 we could eventually get a good export. It isn't that one setting works and one doesn't - it is more a case of if one doesn't work then the other will. We never could determine a cause/effect relationship as to what would cause an export to fail, and with the failed exports, which AutoCAD version setting would deliver a good export.

Has anyone seen anything along these lines? Is this a known issue and we are just the newest of the enlightened?

We fixed this the old fashioned way - by brute force manual editing. If anyone has thoughts on a better process, please advise. With this little bug, SW has cost this office two days of productivity for five engineers plus a big black eye with the customer. Our original plan was to simply use task manager to perform this one evening, with everything complete the next morning.

-dch and friends