SolidWorks 2010 Bible

Chapter 10: Working with Part Configurations

FIGURE 10.15

Suppressing a feature

Controlling custom properties

Several reasons may compel you to use custom properties, including integration with searches for a

Product Data Management system, automatically filling out drawing title blocks, or adding infor-

mation to the BOM.

When you are using custom properties with configurations, you must use the Configuration

Specific Custom Properties interface (or an appropriately configured custom property tab or the

Modify Configurations dialog box), which enables you to have custom properties that change with

each configuration. Standard custom properties apply to the top-level part and keep the same

value for all configurations. The configuration-specific functionality is useful for situations such as

different part numbers for configurations, and many other situations that are limited mostly by

your use of configs. The Custom tab of the Summary Information dialog box, shown in Figure

10.14, still applies custom properties that do not change with the configurations to the part.

The interface for managing custom properties manually is shown in Figure 10.16. You can access

this dialog box by choosing File ➪ Properties from the menu.

You can also link custom properties to mass properties, model dimensions, link values, sketch text,

and global variables by selecting from the drop-down list under the Value/Text Expression column,

which appears when you select a cell in the column, as shown in Figure 10.14. To link a custom

property to a model dimension, simply place the cursor in the Value/Text Expression box that you

want to populate and click a dimension in the graphics window. Again, managing this data for a

single config or only a few configs is easy enough; however, it can quickly become unwieldy,

which is where using design tables can make a huge difference.