Drawing-Automation

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. ...

Most SolidWorks engineers reach for VBA when they need to automate something. It’s right there in the Tools menu, no build toolchain required, and the macro recorder gives you a starting point for anything the GUI can do. Batch exporting drawings from the PDM vault is exactly this kind of task — repetitive, time-consuming, and automatable. What’s less obvious is where VBA’s limits are, and how to get PDM state awareness without switching to a C# application. ...

Pack and Go through the UI is fine for a one-off operation. When you’re doing it repeatedly — versioning a drawing before a revision cycle, archiving a job package, moving a drawing to a different project folder with all its references intact — you want a macro that runs Pack and Go, tells you where the new file landed, closes the original, and opens the copy. The SOLIDWORKS API supports all of this via the IPackAndGo interface, but the documentation examples stop at SavePackAndGo and leave the “then open the copy” part as an exercise for the reader. ...

Exporting a hundred drawings to PDF before a design review is one of those tasks that eats an afternoon. With SolidWorks PDM, there are three ways to automate it: the built-in Batch Plot tool, the SolidWorks Task Scheduler, and a custom API script that talks to both PDM and SolidWorks. They’re not equivalent — each has hard limits that determine which one fits your situation. What SolidWorks PDM Batch Plot Actually Does SolidWorks PDM Professional includes a Batch Plot tool accessible from the Windows Explorer PDM client. Right-click a folder or a selection of .slddrw files → Batch Plot. The tool opens SolidWorks in the background (PDM handles the license check), iterates through the selected drawings, and exports them to a configured output path. ...

SolidWorks automation: four levels and where drawing creation fits SolidWorks automation exists on a spectrum. Understanding where each approach sits — what it costs to implement, what it can do, and where it breaks — saves engineers from picking a tool that is the wrong shape for the job. Level 1 — Record macro. SolidWorks’ built-in macro recorder captures UI actions as VBA code. You click through a sequence of steps, stop the recorder, and have a macro that replays those steps. This works for simple, identical operations: changing a document property across ten files, printing a drawing with fixed settings. It breaks immediately when the input varies — different part names, different view orientations, any conditional logic. The recorder also silently drops interactions with dialog boxes, property manager panels, and anything that requires polling SolidWorks for a return value. The SolidWorks macro recorder limitations guide documents exactly what it misses. ...