SOLIDWORKS Quick Tip - Linking Properties to a Drawing

hello my name is Tyler young and I am a support engineer at Co engineer and in today's quick tip video I want to show you how to link custom properties to your drawing title block so that when you insert an item or insert a part with custom properties it will automatically insert those into your drawing so first let's take a look here we have our bracket and let's just insert this into a new drawing and show you what I'm getting right now so here's my drawing I put a view in come down here to this title block this is a default title block that comes with SolidWorks and you'll see this is our title block and we want to have items be automatically populated in this title block right now nothing's coming in automatically but what we want to do let's in this example say we want to apply a make a material and the weight of the material automatically come in each time we create a new drawing so what we're going to do is link these properties and then save this as a template alright to do that we're going to edit our sheet format and then we have this title block on the sheet format so we need to stay define title block we can zoom back in here and right here is a note and we want to include this note in our title block so I'm just going to say select there and include that right here in our weight item we don't have a note so we're going to have to do something extra for that so right now we're going to click OK we can now select this note here but again we don't have a note there so we need to insert a new note I'm going to just put this note up here type something in it just to give me a placeholder then I'm going to drag this note down to this weight location come back into the title block and select that note so now that note is part of our title block as well okay except that so now I have these two notes that I can click and use so what we want to do is come in to this note and we want to link this note to a property we want to link it to a property in the model that is used in the sheep property so the model that were using if we select that we can come here and we can link to these different items but we don't actually have a custom property for this part yet so before we actually do this before we are able to link this we need to exit that and let's go back to that part so we can see this part actually doesn't have a material applied so we're going to come in and apply material let's just say a simple plain carbon steel material so now we have a material applied and with that comes a weight but we still need to do additional feature additional work to be able to get that into our drawing title block we need to make a file property you can click this button up here the file properties or you can also come file and click properties the way we need to do this is make these a custom material so very custom property so here our property name this is what we are going to call our property the first one we're going to choose is we want to call a property material now we need to make this give this a value somehow so we can come in and use default or built in values that SolidWorks has here we're going to say material as soon as I do that it pulls in a the code that SolidWorks uses for this material for this custom property and then it gives us the value that it's evaluating to write now let's do the same thing for weight now you can see as soon as I do that it does give that part some weight as well all right so that's what I need to do inside my part file let's come back into the drawing file it's going to say that some sheets are out of date now let's update them that's just fine let's come back into editing the sheet format and now we can click in this note I'm going to double click the note delete out the items that are in there and now I want to link to property so now when I say link it to the model in the view that now has a material and a weight so I just click material click OK and that now gives me my material there so I can click and move that away I can click in this note double click in there delete out what's in there and link it to the property of wait oh I need to change it to the model and then link it to the white ok as you can see this note is a lot larger and different than this note and that's because this was a custom created note so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to come in really quick change the color on that using my line style toolbar just going to come in and change that to this gray color and then I'm also going to not use the document font just use a custom font and this font I want is a nine-point font so I okay that and now it's about the right size and I can save that in there move that in there okay so exit that so now for this item you can see we have our part we have our material and our weight and that's great but this is just this individual drawing we now need to save this as a template so that in future times we use this template it will automatically open with this weight the weight and the material inserted there so to do that I'm going to delete out my view so yes to delete it and then I'm going to do a save as I'm going to change this from saving as a drawing to a drawing template it automatically points to my drawing template location and I'm just going to call this template material I'm going to save that so it says the templates only store empty views different things we'll just click OK on that I'm going to close this and let's go to a different part here in this other part I've already created this part with a material and I've already defined the weight in the material so I'm just going to insert this into a new drawing my material template that I've just created I'm going to pull in just any view here I'm going to click OK and you can see it already comes up with that material and with that weight so in this video we went through a way of customizing your drawing templates and saving them for future use so that they are linked automatically with custom properties you have defined in your part you can do the same thing with assemblies this has been a quick tip video I hope you have enjoyed it you

Channel: GoEngineer

Views: 203,112

Keywords: goengineer, engineering, MCAD, mechanical engineering, product design, product development, solidworks, drawing, link, custom, property, link custom property, customize, template, parts, assembly, assemblies, titleblock, title, block, properties

Id: 3Uh6jPLOS9E

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2013