Custom Properties are the key to managing information in SolidWorks files.   

Custom Properties store information in the models that can be “read” through to the drawings of those models. They store information that can be carried through to the bill of materials. They can be used by PDM solutions to track revision, where-used, and reference information. They can even be stretched a bit in their application to facilitate file management in the absence of a PDM system. This is before we even begin to talk about all the ways Custom Properties can be used in custom programming applications. (We will soon have a link here detailing more about how to use Custom Properties. In the mean time, a good general explanation can be found on Joe Jones’ site http://www.nhcad.com/old/html/cprops.asp or in the powerpoint presentation by Leonard Kikstra .)

Most people who use SolidWorks for a while quickly become sold on the usefulness of Custom Properties. But then they run into a catch. Custom Properties only work the way you want them to if you can type in the name Perfectly for every model: no extra spaces, no missing hyphens, no misspellings, no nothin’! This consistency is hard enough to maintain for one designer. The potential for error increases exponentially when the standards must be maintained by an entire work-group, department, company, or international corporation.  (Update Note: SW2003 has improved on this situation with its editable list of custom properties.  Consistency across a work-group can still be difficult, though.  And the selections are still limited to one file at a time.)

Tired of Repetitively Typing your Custom Properties?

There are measures to mitigate the burden of laboriously typing the same set of property names over and over again. The introduction of custom templates in SolidWorks as a starting point for new files vastly improves the situation for new files. Often, however, the need for a Custom Property becomes apparent after a file has already been started. Then the process becomes more cumbersome. Design tables also provide a good mechanism for assuring that Configuration-Level Custom Properties are consistently named across all configurations within a model. The scope of a design table, however, only extends to the configurations within a given model.

A number of Custom Property macros and samples are available for modification to ensure that the same set of property names are entered when the program is run for each model. While these programs and macros are unquestionably useful, the limitation here is that most users would rather not monkey with programming code each time their Standards change. Secondly, these programs generally deal with only one document at a time (the currently active document in SolidWorks), but evolving Standards often require addition of Custom Properties to hundreds or thousands of files at a time.

So … What’s a SolidWorks User to do? We love to use our Custom Properties, but we hate to enter them. Allow me to introduce my proposed solution: The Custom Properties Propagator (a.k.a., “The Propa-Gator”).