This idea came from one of my customers and frankly this is why I love my job. SolidWorks is not just a tool taking your design and turn it 3D on the screen.
This program also has great Metadata Power!
Metadata can be a deep subject, but we are going to keep it on a light note in this blog post. Objective is to capture some predefined values our designer can choose to add for oversize, when ordering stock material for the manufacturing floor. We want to save this information with our part (Custom properties) but also having it display automatically on our 2D Manufacturing drawing.
I have always seen two announces in regards stock material.
You have to order it days or weeks before you need it, many times when the actually design and concept is not even finalized
When you are ready to start your project you stand with this piece of material in your hand. Wondering if this was really what you actually ordered (Can’t find the dang yellow sticky note)
Using Metadata and automatically link it to other documents accomplishes
One entry (Effective)
One entry (Less likely making mistakes)
One entry (When a design changes, 1 and 2 is more important then ever imaginable!)
Check out the following video. In 12min. we are going to cover Custom Property Tab Builder, Custom Properties, Equations, Link to Property and General Tables in 2D Drawings. Friends, that is less than 3min. per subject…proving that SolidWorks can do more than just 3D Modeling and frankly it is pretty easy to add some Metadata Magic.