Materials List

Seth,
As far as I know, you can't remove the mistake.
I'll try to open and edit the file later tonight and will let you know how it goes.
Tom

A question I have is how to transfer this info or custom hole wizard info to another computer or even back it up and restore it if you need to set up a new computer. I don't believe the copy option wizard will do it.
Dave H

Yep, you can edit it with Notepad.
Mike Wilson

Mike,
You are correct, notepad opens the file.
I don't know about your notepad, but mine showed numerous sq. characters that I didn't know if they made a data base difference. Also there are numerous indents and sq. characters which seem to be the material ("number")???
All in all it is not a nice file to edit.
Tom

Mike,
I was able to open the custom database in Notepad. Now, is it a simple mater of deleting everything from the "material name" line that I don't want up to the next "material name" line? Or is there something else that must change in the file also?
Thanks, Seth

Mike,
I forgot to tell you why the question about what to change in the material data file.
I notice lots of square characters at the end of almost every line in the file. But, what is interesting is that every sequential material has one extra square character at the end of the line.
For example the 1st and 2nd materials, for some reason, do not have any square characters (can't explain this one). However, my 3rd material has 1 square character after every line. My 4th material has 2 square character after every line. My 5th material has 3 square character after every line. My 6th material has 4 square character after every line. And so on...
I don't know what the character represent so I don't really want to screw it up.
I am hoping that they are used to somehow let SW know which material a certain part is supposed to be. For example, lets say I originally created a material of "S7" and applied it to a part. Later I decided that I wanted to change the material name to "AISI S7" within this data file, and it had say 8 square characters behind it. When I reopen that part file that had "S7" applied to it, I am hoping that SW somehow knows that the material is supposed to be the one with 8 square characters regardless of the material name. That would make renaming the materials a little easier so that don't have to re-apply materials in every part that was originally "S7". But it may be that the material becomes embedded within the SW part file and doesn't it matter. Can anyone confirm this before I waste my time trying it?
If that isn't what the square characters do, that I am afraid that just deleting lines may cause problems. But I don't know. Any thoughts or experiences?
Seth

I'm going to guess that that is a bug in how SolidWorks creates those files. I'm also going to guess that they are those 'carriage return' symbols used to create a new line of text similar to the one's you find in a drawing detail view text.
These are basically HTML files, so I don't see why those carriage returns should be in there.
If you create a brand new material file, those squares don't show up until you create about three material names. I went and deleted them and I haven't seen any negative impact. In fact SolidWorks runs better if you do (heh, just kidding).
Mike Wilson

That should do the trick. It's similar to web page editing.
MikeWilson

This is what I'm seeing here. If you rename a material, you basically 'sever' the associative link. The material is still applied to the part (it needs to be in order for others to open the part without your material database file) but when you edit it, you have to "re-link" it to the new name.
I can see why SolidWorks programmed it this way. You wouldn't want a dozen pop-up messages showing up every time you opened an assembly saying... "Can't find material..." PhotoWorks is bad enough at doing that ;^)
Mike Wilson

I believe you to be correct. If you look at the SolidWorks default file at \SolidWorks\lang\english\sldmaterials\solidworks\materials.sldmat, there are none of the ascii caracters that show up in the user created file.
Dave H
Mike J. Wils>>I notice lots of square characters at the end of almost every line in the >>file.

Those squares usually mean a character of some sort in the file that doesn't map into the current character set.
But I'm curious because I'm not seeing them in my files. Exactly where is it that these odd characters show up?
BTW, technically these are XML files, not HTML, although the tag-style formatting should look kind of familiar.
--Brenda

I believe it's just be a matter of the current font, and less-than-100 percent compatible editors. Most WIN/DOS editors store "new line" characters as two invisible characters, a "carriage return" char, and a "line feed" char, (presumably to keep backward compatability with the dozen or so Royal typewriters that are still being used). Some editors/OS'es use just a single CR char or a single LF char.
When a WIN editor expects to see both these chars, and only sees one, it forgets to make the Char invisible, and start a new line, and instead displays the Char and does NOT start a new line.
Open the thing in DOS edit and see how it looks then. SavesAS to another file name, and then load it back up in your fav editor.

Thanks Mike. Too bad I don't know web page editing :) OK I edited the file to delete the material that I accidentally duplicated. But something is amiss now. Every time I try to add a new material, I get a fatal error. To quote the error:
Fatal Error: c00cee61: line: 1, column 2 File: X:\Materials Databases\Custom Materials.sldmat Illegal qualified name character.
SW is still working fine though. And if I try to add a material from the default database there are no problems. When I try to add a material and access the custom materials again, I get the same error again. When I edit the materials file, I see that the everything above the line is not there (compared it to a backup copy of course). If I copy and paste the missing data (header data I presume) from the backup file into the crapped out file, it will work fine again until I add another material to it. Then I have the same error and the same missing data.
Does anyone have a clue what's going on here?
Seth