VB program to show Parent/child tree

Hi,

I remember seeing Catia operators reviewing some sort of tree that
showed all of the parent child relationships in a model.

By reviewing the tree, they could easily see how features were
related, and whether the integrity of the model was heavily dependent
on some key features that, if removed, would cause all sorts of
problems.

Is anybody able to write some basic program to analyse the parent
child relationships in a Solidworks model and display them as a tree.
Even something as basic as this, using ASCII characters:

Extrude31
|
|--CutExtrude1--Sweep4
|
CutExtrude1

Just a thought...

Anthony

 

You will find a couple such programs in the API Help included with SW.

 

You're lucky. I'm just working on www.cadml.com a set of tools that build
features GRAPHS, and much more...
It's free, unfinished, so it has no real installer yet, you must follow the
instructions to get all the parts working together.
Tell me what you think.

 

Thanks Philippe,

This looks awesome! I will give it a go.

How does it draw the lines between features on the pseudo 'feature tree'?

Is there any way to make the tree look more uniform, like a subway map?

Regards,

Anthony

 

It currently takes all the "parent / child" relationships from SW. I'm
considering:
1) add external references
2) remove the "transitive" relations, for example if A->B->C and A-C then
delete A->C
it would simplify the graph, but could be misleading, especially to
track errors

Can do many things. see
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/examples/ and tell me which
one you like most.
But you should consider that dependency graphs differs from "subway maps":
1) they are oriented. There is a parent and a child, so top-down (like the
FMT) or left-right ordering is logical
2) there is no "center", no clear "star structure" that could be exploited
3) there is no "distance" between nodes...

Yeah, and tell me about bugs and suggestions, it's "in progress" work...

 

ok you're right, it's time for a real installer..

 

Ahhh! Thank you for the hint, Philippe! Awesome graphics library! I thought
I had already seen everything cool.


-h-