Part II: Building Intelligence into Your Parts
FIGURE 10.5Enabling configuration descriptions
I discuss the Bill of Materials (BOM) options in Chapter 24, but the option is set in the
Configuration Properties to use the filename, the configuration name, or a custom name that the
user specifies. You can save this setting with a template. You achieve control over configurations
through the combination of the Configuration Properties and the Advanced Options, which I dis-
cuss next.Best Practice
Although you can change the preferred settings at any time, it is definitely a best practice to make a template
early on when you are using SolidWorks to model parts. SolidWorks remembers the BOM options and
Advanced options that you set for the Default configuration and uses them in document templates. This is true
for both part and assembly templates. n
Advanced options ..........................................................................................
Two advanced configuration options are found in the bottom panel of the Configuration Properties
PropertyManager: Suppress features and Use configuration specific color. While the second option
is self-explanatory, the first one is not, and often catches new and even experienced users off
guard.Suppress features refers to how inactive configurations should handle new features that are added
to the part. For example, if you have two configs, 1 and 2, and config 1 is active and you add a
new Fillet feature, what happens to that feature in config 2? If this option is turned on, the new
features are suppressed in the inactive configs. If it is turned off, the new features will be unsup-
pressed when the inactive configs are activated. This creates a much bigger challenge for manually
created configurations than for design table-driven configs because changing suppression states for
several features across multiple configs is much easier in a design table than in manual config man-
agement.