Windchill WorkGroup Manager for SolidWorks

[GrahameWard]

Hi everyone. Our company has recently decided to favor SolidWorks, but we have Windchill as our PDM system. Saving drawings and models to Windchill with the Workgroup Manager seems fairly straightforward, however we need to save our company drawing formats to Windchill as well. That's what we do with our Creo formats.

Does anyone know how to do this? I have created formats before in SW, and saved them to a server location, then set up our System Options/File Locations.... etc. What I am trying to do is save them to my Workspace, then check them in to Formats library cabinet. I can go File/Save Sheet Format....  and select Workspace as the place to save it to, but I don't see anything in my Workgroup Manager in Workspace. I assume it's something to do with access permissions, but I am logged in to Workgroup manager as Orgadmin, which is the only way to write to our libraries.

[irfan_md]

Hi GrahameWard,

With which extensions you are creating formats in SW.

As per my knowledge, till now PTC supports only the format files with extension (*.prtdot, *.asmdot and *.drwdot) and files apart from the mentioned extension will not be saved to workspace thats why your workspace was empty.

Please follow the below steps:

1. Register SolidWorks with the Windchill Workgroup Manager and open linked session of SolidWorks
2. In Windchill Workgroup Manager, go to Tools > Server Management > Cache tab and copy the path in the Location field
3. Open the template file (.prtdot, .drwdot, .asmdot.) in SolidWorks that you have already created with the mentioned extensions.
4. Perform Save As within SolidWorks and save to the active workspace folder under the Location determined in step 2
5. Refresh the Active workspace page and the template file will be present in the workspace

It would be great if it helps resolving your issue.

Thanks & Regards,

Irfan

[GrahameWard]

Hi Irfan,

Thanks for your reply. I have not tried saving template files to Windchill. We have those too, also stored off Windchill, and I am not worried about them, I believe I can upload those without any trouble. What I want to store is the format files, with the .SLDDRT extension.  Templates are only useful when you start a drawing. What if someone wants to re-load a format into an existing drawing? We can do that easily enough in Creo. The Creo versions of our formats are stored in a Library cabinet.

[tnichol]

I am in this exact same situation. Has anyone found a solution?

[TomU]

We just keep all of this stuff outside Windchill.  Tables, blocks, formats, templates, macros, settings, etc.

[GrahameWard]

I logged call with PTC Support a while back. there's nothing to be done about it. Those objects types aren't supported by Windchill.