A Hidden Gem in SolidWorks 2009

Over the last week or so Mike Puckett has been blogging about some new hidden features in regards to printing that are included in SolidWorks 2009. You can find his posts about them here and here. I also have found a little hidden gem to will pay huge dividends for our company. As I mentioned yesterday, I attended a What’s New In SolidWorks 2009 event last Friday and discovered this little hidden feature that I had to share with you.

Over the past year or two I have had many conversations with the other designers about how nice it would be to have component suppress functionality without losing all of the mates that you have tied to that component. We usually suppress components when we don’t want them loaded into our memory but it is usually a slippery slope because you don’t want the components you are working on to be under defined position wise. Friday I discovered that our wishes had been granted and we will finally be able to do all of the above in SolidWorks 2009.

Unload Hidden Components

Sounds simple enough, huh? Well it is and its results can be enormous depending on your industry. As most of you know, when you suppress a component in an assembly you are taking that component out of memory, but remember, you are also taking all of the features and dependencies of that component out of your assembly as well. It is actually the same as deleting that component but you have the option to easily put it right back into memory and your assembly. When you hide a component, all you are doing is turning the display of that component off, nothing else. Everything tied to that component stay right where they are at in the assembly and everything stays fully defined.

This is the problem that our designers usually run into on a day to day basis. There are a lot of times where we are only working on a small section of the assembly and we want to turn everything else off and get it out of memory so that our assembly runs smoother. But we can’t always do that because of the mates to the components that we want off so we end up just dealing with it and count our losses. In SolidWorks 2009 we will be able to hide the components that we don’t want to see, unload hidden components and keep all our mates intact. So you ask, HOW?

The first step is to load up the assembly that you want to work on and hide all of the components other than the ones that you need to work on as you can see that I did in the picture below.

Once you have done this all you need to do is RMB click the assembly title in the FeatureManager tree and select “Unload Hidden Components” as you can see in the picture below.

DONE, just like that you have taken all of your hidden components out of memory while still retaining all of your mates. In order to load them back in all you need to do is show your hidden component and it is back into memory. You will notice that it takes a little longer for your components to show if they have been unloaded out of memory because it has to load them back in. I’ll take that trade off.

In conclusion, I give the SolidWorks development team an A++ for this new hidden functionality. It is like they read our mind on this tool. This functionality on top of all of the actual performance enhancements will make SolidWorks 2009 the best release to date for me (it has only been 4 releases, but still). All I have to say is keep up the great work on features like this SolidWorks, it makes each new release all the more anticipated.