Do you keep file types in different directories? (NON-PDM)

[BodyBagger]

Hello all,
I wanted to poll how different people maintain their files. The company I am at currently seperates everything. Parts, Assemblies, Drawings, Fasteners, Plumbing, Purchased Parts, Electrical, etc... all have seperate file folders. Other companies I have worked for do not do this and they just put everything in one folder. How do you do it and what is your preferred way?

Thanks for your input.

BB

 

[kellnerp]

Ed,

My question is why have any intelligence at all in the folder or file name? SW has these things called custom properties that can easily be made to have a CATEGORY field. I have written API scripts that go through thousands of parts/assy files and put this information in. SW has had tools that can search on custom properties for a long time.

Why use custom props?

In an assembly you can hide all but a certain category using a custom prop filter. Can't do that with any of these other schemes or maybe just a little.

Ever try to get more than one person to consistently use any of these naming conventions? If one person screws up some file names it can hose a whole project, whereas a custom prop can be safely edited.

There are a plethora of tools around to manage custom props including adding things like project, customer, etc.

Just my 2 cents.

TOP
CSWP, BSSE

http://www.engtran.com

http://www.niswug.org

"Node news is good news."

 

[drawoh]

EdDanzer,

We have PDM but we are still accessing toolbox fasteners from the hard drive. At some point, our sysadmins migrated the toolbox fasteners to a new server and they retired the old one.

Our read-only files out of PDM were connected to the old server. When we loaded them, SolidWorks timed out, waiting for the server to respond. It took me 45_minutes to load a large assembly into SolidWorks, and the whole thing crashed on me, usually within minutes. Can you say "counterproductive?"

Eventually, I managed to get sysadmin to put up a fake version of the old file server, reducing the timeouts. I was able to modify the assembly model and fix file links and reconfigure everything as per good SolidWorks practise.

External references to a file tree are only functional if you control the file tree.

JHG

 

[EdDanzer]

The reason to have some level of intelligence in our part number and file system is that several of the people who interact with the system are not engineers, many of the parts or assemblies may not be revisited for 3 or more years, we are a small company with limited time and resources to develop a complex systems for low value products. When we started using SolidWorks in 1995 there was no good or fast method of searching files so we had to develop an inexpensive system that was easy to train people to use at a low cost that provided fast access to information with hardware that is slow by today’s standards. This system still works better than many of our customers more complex and expensive systems because they call us to find out what was done many years ago.

We do use custom file properties for each part or assembly to provide consistent information on BOM’s. If at all possible we reuse a similar part as a template to allow for consistent naming conventions, and part interchangeability.

Ed Danzer

http://www.danzcoinc.com

http://www.dehyds.com

 

[EdDanzer]

drawoh,

We have all parts and assemblies in one primary folder (21+gb data, 31,600+ files) so we cannot have the problem you describe.

It would be interesting to do time studies on different peoples systems to see how the actual productivity compares. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an unbiased productivity test for software usage.


Ed Danzer

http://www.danzcoinc.com

http://www.dehyds.com

 

[rgrayclamps]

Hi,

This subject was discussed at the link below:

http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=249325

Below is what we use:

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>New Vault
>>_Checkin
>>_Working
>>Assemblies
>>>Assy 00000
>>>Assy 00001
......
>>Parts
>>>Part 00000
>>>Part 00001
>>>Part 00002
>>>Part 00003
>>>Part 00004
>>>Part 00005
>>>Part 00006
>>>Part 00007
>>>Part 00008
......
>>_Standard
>>_Toolbox parts

We use ten characters (non-intelligent) for part models (drawings) beginning with "P-". We use ten characters (non-intelligent) for assembly models (drawings) beginning with "A-". Each folder holds a thousand of part numbers or assembly numbers.

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