Solidworks-Api

The Move Face command in SOLIDWORKS has three modes: Offset, Translate, and Rotate. In Translate mode, the PropertyManager shows a Copy checkbox. When checked, the original face stays in place and a translated copy is created alongside it — useful for generating offset geometry, creating clearance ledges, or duplicating a surface patch to use as a reference. The API tells a different story. IFeatureManager.InsertMoveFace3 is the method that drives Move Face programmatically. Its signature accepts a move type from swMoveFaceType_e (0 = Translate, 1 = Rotate, 2 = Offset), the faces to move, and the transformation values. There is no copy parameter. IMoveFaceFeatureData, the data accessor for reading back a Move Face feature, has properties for MoveType, Distance, Rotation, TranslationX/Y/Z, and the face arrays — but no Copy or bCopy flag anywhere in the interface. ...

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. ...

Every SOLIDWORKS weldment tutorial starts with “Insert Structural Member” and assumes the profile library is already populated. It never explains where those profiles actually live, what format they use, or what to do when the profile you need isn’t there. If you’re trying to automate weldment creation via a VBA macro, the API reference assumes you already have the profile path, which means you need to know the folder structure before you can write a single line of code. ...

If you’ve tried to get a flat pattern from a cylindrical collar in SolidWorks, you’ve hit this wall: the Sheet Metal toolbar’s normal workflow assumes you start flat and bend up. A cylinder was never flat. SolidWorks has no direct “unroll cylinder” command, and if you try to use the Convert to Sheet Metal tool on a solid cylinder, it either rejects the geometry or produces a body with wrong thickness. ...

Some SolidWorks settings save reliably between sessions. Others reset silently every time you restart, or behave differently depending on how SolidWorks was installed, what Windows profile type is in use, and whether any admin policy overrides your preferences. This post covers the specific settings that fail most often, where they’re stored, and the fixes that work. Where SolidWorks Stores Its Settings SolidWorks stores user settings in two places: the Windows registry and document files. Knowing which is which tells you immediately whether a reset issue is a machine problem or a template problem. ...

The Wrap feature works instantly or fails with a cryptic error, with little indication of which outcome you’ll get until you click OK. Three modes — Emboss, Deboss, Scribe — fail in different ways and for different geometric reasons. Knowing which one applies to your geometry, and why the others will fail, stops the rebuild-error loop before it starts. What the Three Modes Actually Do All three Wrap modes start with a sketch on a flat plane and project that sketch geometry onto a curved or non-planar face. The divergence is what happens to the geometry after it lands. ...

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. ...

Every SolidWorks API developer has spent hours debugging a macro that produces no error, no exception, and completely wrong output. The SolidWorks COM API is old enough that many of its failure modes predate modern error handling conventions — methods that silently return Nothing, boolean flags that are ignored, and side effects that modify document state without warning. This is a catalogue of the seven most common ones. Each has a pattern, a root cause, and a fix. ...

If your shop uses SolidWorks and your supplier’s shop uses Inventor, at some point you will end up comparing notes on batch DXF export. Both platforms flatten sheet metal and write DXF files. Both can be automated. The workflows look similar from a distance and differ substantially in the details that matter for production pipelines. This is a comparison of the actual automation approaches, not marketing specs. Platform capabilities are drawn from the COM API (SolidWorks) and the ObjectModel/iLogic API (Inventor). ...

The SolidWorks API speaks one language for lengths: meters. Not millimeters. Not inches. Meters, always, regardless of what your document’s unit system displays. This sounds like something you’d learn in the first chapter of any SolidWorks API tutorial, and it is — yet it causes more silent macro failures than any other single issue. The problem is not that developers don’t know about it. The problem is that it bites you in a second way you didn’t expect, in a context you were already confident about. ...