BUG - Opening multiple documents via Windows Explorer now impossible

Does anyone have knowledge where and who is developing their software these days? The quality is pathetic and seems to degrade with each new release. Great features, poor quality.

Kman

Jim, Both of these methods are working for me in 2004 SP1 running under Win2000 SP4

Richard

Tried in SW2003 and it did not work there either.

You can tile SW and WinExplorer and drag the three selected files into the SolidWorks session at one time.

Windows XP here.

Jim S.

The right click and open won't work for any prior version if SW2004 is installed on the same machine. 2004 is associated with the file type.

Interestingly, after reading the above, I assumed that you had meant 'one at a time'. So, just to be sure, I tried it, and as you say, I was able to drag all three into SW 2004 at once and they each opened. Subsequent experiments indicate that the behavior is intermittent, which is actually worse than just plain broken.

Jim S.

I just tried a similar procedure using 4 ".doc" files. Ctrl-select the files, RBM, select "Open", and I got four instances of Word, not four documents in one instance. Ctrl-select the files and drag-drop into an empty session of Word, and I still get Word opened three more times. I can't think this is simply a "SW bug"

Jim, I just tried it on my laptop (XP Pro) and it still works here. It even opened the derived (mirrored) part that was referenced by one of the selected parts (I had to try it three times before I fugred out why it was opening four parts instead of the three I had selected).

Your original message referred to SP2. Just a guess, but could the install of the SP hosed it up somehow? Maybe try to repeat the test on a "clean" computer.

Richard

I saw the problem on a different machine running SP1. At the time I didn't recognize what the problem was, but I can see now that it was the same issue.

Jim S.

Steve - quite right. I think that anyone who is having this problem owes it to themselves to look into their explorer launch association and see if having (I think) DDE enabled or not changes the undesirable behavior.

Based on having DDE enabled or not will cause a new window to open or not - at least this is what I have seen over the years.

The real problem (caused by solidworks programming) is a serious lack of a multi file open capability in the current solidworks "open" dialogue. This is the real problem here, not that explorer acts strange as it always does.

Regards,

SMA

Fight The Plower . . .

No, you got four windows, and one instance of Word. The task manager will tell you as much, as well as the fact that closing one via 'File...Exit' closes them all.

Microsoft recently decided that MDI apps are no longer useful. The think it is much better to fill your taskbar with dozens of IE, Word, Excel or other application windows. So be it, but SW is still an MDI app and should behave like one.

Once again, you get three windows and one instance or Word.

Why not? Even if your post was accurate, SW doesn't behave in the manner you describe. It locks up the Explorer application, which is undoubtedly because it is blocking waiting for SW to make a response that it never makes.

I'm also fairly confident that this right click to open functionality

*for SW* worked in the past. I commonly need to open two dozen drawings to print them. However, I suppose it is possible that my recollection is faulty and I did this only with my previous machine running Windows NT.

In any event, SW and SW alone needs to fix the problem. If that means that SW can no longer be an MDI app, so be it. I'll mourn the loss though, because I typically have 20-30 files open.

Jim S.