SolidWorks 2010 Bible

Part II: Building Intelligence into Your Parts

Derived configurations

Derived configurations are configs that are dependent on other configs. You can create them from

the RMB menu on a configuration, and they appear indented underneath the parent config. Figure

10.13 shows the RMB menu and the position of the derived config in the tree.

FIGURE 10.13

Creation and placement of the derived config

Derived configurations maintain the same values and properties of the parent config unless you

break the link to the child config by explicitly changing a value in the child config. For all other

values, the child config value changes when the parent config value changes.

One very nice application of derived configs is to use them for simplified configurations, and set

the properties so that any features that are added to the parent config are also added to the derived

config. You can do this by deselecting the Advanced Option Suppress Features to Off in the

PropertyManager for the configuration. This causes the derived config to inherit only features that

are added to the parent, and not to other configs. You can use the simplified configs for Finite

Element Analysis (FEA), making drawings of models where all of the edge breaks have actually

been modeled. You can also used use them for the reverse (a complex config rather than simple

one) to have a config that includes fillets for rendering purposes that are otherwise not there. In

addition, you can create and maintain derived configs using design tables, which are discussed in

the next section.

File size considerations

A long-standing dispute has raged over the effects of file size on speed. Here are the facts: When

SolidWorks creates a configuration, it stores information about the 3D geometry and a preview

thumbnail of the configuration inside the part file. This makes it faster to access the configuration

the next time because it has only to read the data, rather than read other data and then recalculate

the new data. As a result, saving the stored data makes the file larger, but also enables you to avoid

having to recalculate it.

Many people assign more importance to file size than I do, and use it as a criterion on which to base

decisions about which features or techniques to use or not use. If I can use a single file instead of