Api

When you have two versions of the same part — the designed file and the manufactured sample, a supplier’s model and your original, or two revisions where you can’t find the delta — SOLIDWORKS has a built-in tool for exactly this. It overlays the geometry, highlights the differences, and produces a report. Most engineers have never seen it because it lives behind an add-in that is disabled by default. It is called Compare Geometry, and it is part of the SOLIDWORKS Utilities add-in. ...

Generating SolidWorks drawings manually — open part, new drawing, place views, fill title block, insert BOM, save PDF — is fine for a handful of parts. At scale it becomes a bottleneck. The SolidWorks API exposes every step of that workflow, and a well-structured macro or add-in can generate complete drawing packages for an entire assembly in minutes. This post covers the full pipeline: creating drawing documents from a template, adding model views, populating title block annotations from custom properties, inserting BOMs, and exporting to PDF. Both VBA (for quick scripts) and C# (for production add-ins) approaches are shown. ...

What SolidWorks Automation Actually Means “SolidWorks automation” gets used for everything from a 20-line VBA macro that renames a file to a full production-grade COM add-in that processes 10,000 parts a night. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is measured in months of development, not hours. This guide maps the territory. Four automation approaches cover almost everything teams do with SolidWorks programmatically. Each one has a ceiling. Knowing which ceiling you’re about to hit before you write code saves rebuilding the same solution twice. ...

Right-click a feature, choose Parent/Child, and you see 12 children listed. Open Display/Delete Relations on the sketch — nothing. Enter Edit Feature — no explicit references to those children. Where are these relationships hiding? This is one of the most common sources of rebuild failures and change-propagation surprises in SOLIDWORKS. Features that appear independent are connected through mechanisms that don’t show up in the usual places. This post maps every source of non-obvious parent/child dependencies and shows how to find and break them. ...

The scenario: a supplier sends fifty SolidWorks parts. The files land in the PDM vault. The PDM admin manually fills in the data cards — material, description, part number, revision. Everything is correct in the vault database. But the files themselves have no custom properties. Any downstream tool that reads properties directly from the file (a drawing, an ERP integration, a batch export macro) sees blanks. The natural fix — run the built-in Task Scheduler “Add/Update Custom Properties” task — breaks the data cards. The task adds the file properties and then syncs them back to the data card. Because the file properties were blank when the task ran, the sync writes blank back over the values the admin entered. ...

A SOLIDWORKS user on the 3DEXPERIENCE forum recently posted a batch macro that failed to compile with “Invalid Character.” The macro tried to parameterize a Task Scheduler run with syntax like $$$FOLDER_PATH$$$ and made API calls to CustomPropertyData. Josh Brady identified it immediately: “That is AI-generated code. CustomPropertyData is a hallucinated call. It does not exist in the SolidWorks API.” This failure pattern is now common enough to deserve a direct explanation. SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler has no built-in parameter syntax. VBA macros cannot receive command-line arguments. There are no token substitutions in macro source code. Here is what works instead. ...

A sheet metal enclosure for an elliptical staircase, a conical shroud split into two halves for shipping, a large cylindrical tank section cut into panels for laser cutting — these all share the same fabrication requirement: a curved sheet metal body that must be divided into manageable pieces, each with its own flattenable geometry and its own DXF. SOLIDWORKS’s Split feature appears to solve this. It doesn’t. Applied to a curved sheet metal body, Split divides the geometry but destroys the flat pattern capability on every resulting piece. This post explains why that happens and gives three approaches that actually preserve flattenability. ...

A r/SolidWorks thread from last week: an engineer built a macro that exports a DXF, renames it, and drops a PDF in the right folder. It works on their machine. When they try to run it on a manager’s laptop or a shop floor PC, it crashes with a COM exception or silently does nothing. The replies cover the symptoms but not the root cause, and nobody agrees on the right distribution approach. ...

A question that surfaces repeatedly on r/MechanicalEngineering and r/SolidWorks: how much C# vs VBA do you actually need for a SolidWorks CAD automation role? The answers in those threads range from “VBA is enough” to “you need modern .NET”—and both are correct, depending on what the role actually involves. The real answer is architectural: VBA macros and C# COM add-ins solve different problems. Understanding the boundary between them—and being able to explain it—is what separates candidates who have run a few macros from those who can design production automation systems. ...

The SOLIDWORKS sheet metal environment has two entry points: you either start with a sketch and build the part as sheet metal from the beginning, or you convert an existing solid into a sheet metal body. The second path—Convert to Sheet Metal—is the right tool for STEP imports and inherited legacy parts with no sketches. But it fails silently on a specific class of solid bodies, and understanding why matters both for fixing production parts and for writing API macros that won’t break on edge cases. ...