Equations

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. ...

A user on r/SolidWorks described building a car-configurator-style model. A global variable NumSlots drove both the count of a linear sketch pattern and a sweep feature that read the slot spacing. After dragging the configuration slider, the sweep updated. The sketch pattern did not. Opening the sketch, closing it without touching anything, then rebuilding — slot count finally snapped to the new value. This is not a bug report. It is a predictable consequence of how SolidWorks schedules equation evaluation during a model rebuild. Once you understand that schedule, you stop designing models that depend on the wrong evaluation order and start structuring equations so they survive a Ctrl+B. ...