Flipping mates!

Yipppppeeeeee - a bright moment today!

Last night SP 5.0 came out as EV. One of the changes is a new system
setting under Assemblies that allows you to check a box for "Prompt before
changing mate alignments on edit."

The way it now works is that if you have that box checked, then when in the
situation when it would (undesirably) flip a bunch of mates for you, instead
you get a dialog box that says This change will cause mate errors or
warnings. Do you want SolidWorks to change mate alignments to avoid these
problems?" and actually has a Yes & No button. Clicking the No button then
effects your change and the tree lights up, thereby allowing you to fix the
one other mate that you know is causing the problem, rather than it flipping
20 other mates that you don't want changed. If you click the Yes button,
then it will go ahead and flip all the other mates that it wants to do,
whether you deem them necessary or not, and then you get the old dialog box
that just asks if you would like to view those mates.

If you uncheck the option under assemblies, then you don't get the new first
prompt and it's still the same as people have come to hate. Hopefully this
will put an end to that nonsense.

WT

 

I wish they'd take that capability completely out and put it back the
way it was in 2006. Having SW decide which mates to flip is just asking
for trouble and has caused many headaches and lots of extra reworking
because of it. And to think the answer I got from SW was that people
actually wanted SW to flip the mates that were going to overdefine the
other mates. What a bunch of horse$H!T

 

I wish they'd take that capability completely out and put it back the way

Well you know, in simple cases it works ok. When I first saw it, I had to
flip a bolt. So I did the first mate, expecting then to do the second one,
but it did it for me. Cool, I thought, that's kind of handy. But then the
program took on a life of its own and started flipping 20 or 30 mates at
times. That's when you want to put a stop to it. At least this way it
appears that you can stop it if you wish.

WT

 

And it may work if you don't have any in context relations but when it
started flipping mates and sketches got reversed and the undo wouldn't
work then I started screamin. I hope that it can be set to NEVER flip
mates unless I tell it to flip them.

 

"Last night SP 5.0 came out as EV. "

I assume this is for SW2007. WHere do I find the download for it?

Thanks
Monty

 

Yes, 2007 - you have to be signed up for EV program to get it. But even if
you haven't, it's usually only about a week until the full release happens.

WT

 

Finally!!
Followed by a few dozen ??????
I got very vocal about this issue in Beta for 2007. This was an
application killer as far as I was concerned and I made it clear that
we COULD NOT USE SWX 2007 unless this was corrected.

Caveat - when I have done 2007 assemblies in the second and third
quarter of this year, (which are few because most of our clients are
just starting to migrate) it wasn't nearly as awful or evident as it
was in Beta

Here's the root principle that needs to be understood by our software
vendor: What kind of hubris does it take to assume that 20 perfectly
good mates that I, the DESIGNER, have ALREADY APPROVED should be
redone by software that can't possibly know my intent just to make
sure the 21st mate works (when I could simply flip the alignment of
the 21st mate and everything would be hunky-dory)?
To be honest, I am suprised it took this long for it to be corrected.
Thanks - very much- for the heads up.

Ed

 

Ed,

I was really bothered by this FUNK-tionality at first till I learned
how to avoid it. Still, it is like tap dancing in a mine field. Once
you use it, it doesn't go away without a save, and restart of SWX
AFAIK.

Initially I discovered this FUNK-tionality while doing training and
got egg on my face. I couldn't believe what SWX was doing to, as you
said, pre approved mates. Inquiries to my VAR led to a simple demo
they produced. However, they could not answer any in depth or howto
type questions. They left me hanging through no fault of there own.
They didn't know either.

TOP

PS I think I coined a new word. FUNK-tionality.

 

Yes, this is in addition to the one you are thinking of. That one tells you
that you are going to cause a problem with a new mate you are adding, and
that functionality seems to work properly. The activity in question is when
you are editing an existing mate and it would "take care of you" for good!
Kind of like a mob hit - it makes you forget about the little irritations in
life.

As a related note, I see in the fixed SPR list for 2007 SP5 this item.
"When adding a mate in an assembly between a fully defined component and an
under defined component the fully defined component moves" I'm sure this is
all the same matter - good to see it finally fixed.

WT

 

I have now tried the variety of SPR issues I have turned in related to parts
flipping and they all seem to work properly. It may be a cloudy day
outside, but it's certainly a bright SW day! I think this is one of the
most important fixes I have seen in years.

WT

 

I think we should vote to send the person or persons responsible for
this FUBARed "FUNK-tionality" swimming across the Boston harbor with
concrete flippers on with 10 minutes of air in the air tank. Maybe
they'd thing twice before doing something like this again.

 

Yipee! This "feature" has been causing me headaches ever since we
installed 2007. My entire assembly (200 parts) would get flipped
around when simply changing the distance mate on a small part with
only 3 mates to one other part.

Anyone know if this has been implemented in 2008 SP0? I tried it in
EV1 and it still had the issue.