Toolbox changes in SW2007?

from what I've seen the promised improvements don't work, or work in limited situations. its a bit of a let down for me.

Sorry, I have to retract that.

I did a little more looking into it, and the thing I was most hoping for made it into Toolbox 2007. If you receive an assembly that uses Toolbox parts with configurations that you don't have created, you used to get "huge screws", default configurations. But now in 2007, SW can figure out the configuration size from the name and recreate the config. This is a huge fix to what was a serious showstopper for this software.

There are other fixes too, like the ability to create all configs or all parts at once, and the consolidation of settings.

Its a big improvement, and removes most of my real gripes with what has been a time bomb waiting to destroy your assembly and drawing data.

Things that could still improve are an automated way to customize and populate custom property information, a way to different handle materials with part numbers and descriptions (other than keying in manually one by one).

Thanks for the info , Matt. I'm mostly concerned about legacy data.

We don't use configurations. We use 'Copied Parts'. I was wondering if we are going to problems using the 'Copied Parts' already created. If there was any change to the naming convention, etc.

Aaron

matt wrote:

Matt, "the ability to create all configs or all parts at once"

This is something that I was asking for since the Toolbox round table at SWW

2005. What I would like is a button like "push here to create all ANSI socket head cap screws". Are you telling me that I can do that now? How?

Thanks, Muggs

This has been needed for many years, and although long overdue, it is a welcome fix.

Almost. Close enough to be useful. It's very buried. Let me try to get this right.

- from menus go to Toolbox, Configure

- Expand Ansi Inch

- Expand Bolts and Screws

- Expand Countersunk head

- select countersunk bolt

- on the right, select the All Configurations tab. It will tell you it is generating all configurations, but what it means is that it is creating a list of all of the configuration names.

- click the Create Configurations button at the bottom. it will warn you about how many configs there are and how long it may take.

If you look in the What's New pdf, the functionality is actually listed there.

Thanks Matt,

I'm doing it as we speak.

Muggs

Matt,

Will this do anything if you use 'Copied Parts? Will it create separate part files?

Aaron

snipped-for-privacy@veriz> Almost. Close enough to be useful. It's very buried. Let me try to get > this right.

Does it put all these configurations in a single part?

Yes.

a design table to more specifically tune things.

Yes, it will also do that. You have to first have it set to do parts, which I think is a little different than it used to be. Go to Toolbox menu, Configure, Settings, and set it to Create Parts. Then flip back to the Content tab, and browse as before. The All Configurations tab will now have a button on it that says Create Parts.

Then I have to raise two questions:

1. Some PDM solutions don't deal with configuration parts very well. How will this effect those systems?

1. In the past creating assemblies using parts with lots of configurations has been a performance killer. How do these stack up in that regard?

I can't really answer the first questi> T> > Does it put all these configurations in a single part?

Hey Matt,

I just tried this on a model that I knew to have "huge screws" syndrom, and SW 2007 loaded up with huge screws "as expected" (lol). Am I missing something?

Muggs

You know, I don't even use Toolbox. Would someone from SW or a savvy reseller step in and offer some What's New tech support?

Here's the situation as I understand it. I apologize if its wrong, given a lack of accurate information, this is what I think is going on.

In the tradition of Toolbox, if it's an old assembly, "you're screwed".

I think the assembly has to be built in 2007 or newer to lose the "huge screws" problem. Specifically, I think it has to use a Toolbox library which has the 2007 updates. Which, I think, is pretty freaking effed because I thought it was getting the size information from the configuration or file name, both of which are stored in the assembly. Apparently that's not happening, it's getting size info from some other clever location that didn't exist before. How do you know that your new

2007 parts are doing it right? How do you make sure that if you have existing library parts with descriptions and part numbers that you don't want to lose, that the assemblies those parts go into get updated with the new "clever" id tag? Why couldn't they just use the configuration and file names to figure out what size screw is missing?

Could someone who knows what they're talking about please step up and answer this question?

I spoke with SW about Toolbox problems about a year ago, and I encouraged them to pursue simple solutions that work. Toolbox just seemed to get more and more complex to fix some minor problem, and each layer of complexity added bugs which required more complexity to fix, and on and on... They seem to be very good at coming up with extremely clever solutions that almost work, and this seems to be more of the same in that direction. I can't believe after all the time I spent talking to SW people about this problem and possible solutions, that they solved the problem in a way that doesn't address the existing problems in so much outstanding legacy data. These discussions were explicit, and yet they went pretty far out of their way to make sure that it wouldn't fix existing problems, only new problems, when it would have been easier to fix the existing problems too.

So, if Toolbox has screwed you before, it's gonna keep screwing you until you upgrade to 2007 and manually fix the problem, just exactly in the same way that you were screwed before the 2007 fix came out.

I guess the good news here is that new and future users won't have to learn the term "huge screws" unless they have assemblies which are pre-2007.

I should clarify, that I don't believe this was done out of malice, or out of a conscious effort to disenfranchise existing customers, but simply out of careless hotdogging. This is exactly what I think got them before as well. The simple solution that would have worked was right there, and they chose to do something else.

Again, I hope somebody who knows what they're talking about can correct my speculation.