It requires that you open the parts that you are not responsible for in Read-only mode. That way you can open then, reference them if you need to and work on your parts as well.
Tell me a little about what you do, and how you are approaching it currently. I help people do this sort of thing all the time.
Regards,
Jon
jgbena@yahoo.com
If you are talking about making changes to the same part at the same time the answer is no. If looking at working on the same assembly there are techniques that can help you.
It is very common for my company to have multiple users, fingers, in the same pie at one time. If you give us a step by step description of what you are trying to accomplish I am sure that you will receive a number of different techniques from this forum.
BBJT CSWP
- We have a machine (Assembly A) that is composed for “n” Subassemblies (A.1, A.2, A.3….)
- Let’s pretend there are 3 people working in the Assembly A.
- The first person opens the whole Assembly to make a modification. When he does that, SW automatically sets the other A.1, A.2…. as ready only for the other users in the network.
- When the second person needs to open A.2, the 1st person have to close the whole Assembly A to be possible to edit A.2, then, when A2 is opened in the other machine, the first person have open the whole machine again and continue his work.
- If the 3rd person needs to open A.3, the 1st person must close the Assembly A again, and then, when A.3 is opened, open the machine again.
We will appreciate any tips that you can give us to better work in cases like that…
The first thing that you should do is have everbody go under Tools, Options, External references and put a check in the Open reference documents with read-only access. This will allow the three people to open the same assembly at the same time. You can then right-click on a part in the assembly and reload it for write access by unchecking the read-only in the reload dialog. You can not however have more than one person with write access to the same file at the same time. BBJT CSWP
A work around we have been experimenting with is using Windows Explorer. When you try to save a part that is opened by another, and know it is safe to save it as a newer version, browse to the file, RMB, select Properties, then deselect the Read Only check bow, and Apply. So far, this seems to work well.
The other user can't have the same part open, and the assembly has to be loaded as Light Weight. "Happy the Hare at morning for she is ignorant to the Hunter's waking thoughts."
What about simply editing the individual sub-assemblies instead of someone opening the master assembly and locking everyone else out from the changes?
A third party SolidWorks Partner has concurent engineering software which will keep the master assembly updated in real time if your worried about conflicting changes in the sub-assemblies.
It is a fairly inexpensive document management package that will handle this for you - you check out the parts of the assembly you are responsible for editing, it makes reference (read only) copies of the parts necessary to build the assembly to your machine, and lets other engineers know which parts you are working on by flagging them as OUT. The other engineers can check out the parts they need to work on, the system will give them reference copies (read only) of the stuff you are working on so they can build their assembly and edit their parts.
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