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Reading and writing older versions

What are you talking about? Conspiracy?

Coincidentally, the whole purpose of this thread was to get people thinking about it and commenting accordingly. I'm sure we all agree that's the intended purpose.

I have seen ample examples of SolidWorks files that can't be brought forward without user intervention. Sometimes loading older files results in distinct errors and in other cases there are slight differences in the geometry. Most people that I know view this as a limitation/shortcoming of SolidWorks, but we deal with it and some of these situations are unavoidable (i.e. not a reason to criticize SolidWorks).

Yes, I can imagine going backward to a version that didn't support things like local curvature and tangency control. This problem is dealt with routinely when we export files as dumb solids in any number of older IGES, parasolid, STEP, or ACIS versions. Reading through the various postings in this thread, a variety of people have imagined it and offered their thoughts about how SolidWorks might deal with such situations.

That would be a bad assumption, but that's another story...

Of course, I do work with alot of prismatic shapes (as many people do) and the ability to save them as older versions of SolidWorks files would be useful for a variety of reasons.

Thanks for your interesting postings on this topic.

Reply to
John Eric Voltin
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I think it was promised at SWW two years ago. If SW does it first just think what it will do to Inventor with all those giveaway seats in circulation.

Reply to
TOP

I just ran a test using the ExchangeWorks v.1.4 conversion utility that Baren-Boym was developing. I re-confirmed my earlier findings that even the simplest geometry doesn't convert accurately.

I modeled a simple 1.0" diameter cylinder and saved it as a 3XF format file using ExchangeWorks. I then imported the 3XF file back into SolidWorks using ExchangeWorks. A quick examination of the dimensions showed that the diameter had been changed to 0.99999995". Not a significant difference, but certainly nothing to ignore.

Autodesk attempted to address this type of issue with their "proxy object" approach. It would be kind to say it doesn't work very well.

While backwards translation would help me in some cases, I want it to be robust, and allow for round-tripping without data loss. What many users have suggested in this post would alter the file to such an extent that design intent and future editing would be negatively compromised.

John

Reply to
John Picinich

Interesting Topic - personally I'm with the 'dumb' customers ! The solidworks 'apologists' are probably the same folk who say - 'hey ... its real hard for (poor) software co's to fully debug their software before releasing it - give them a break'. .... give ME a break !!!!

As a engineer/designer i am continuously being challenged to make improvements for end users - and thats what I try and do, willingly and generally with success.

The thing about this issue is its a 'double whammy' .... some form of backward compatibility would not only would it allow sharing with others who have not upgraded at precisely the same time, .............. BUT ALSO, would neatly side-step the problem of flacky early release new versions - with as 'save as' previous version these REAL problems we have to work around are ... history.

Reply to
HumanAmp

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