Cheap/free alternatives to SolidWorks PDM

[gerard]

Greetings all,

I'm about 6 weeks away from retiring from my "day" job.

I've had a seat of SolidWorks standard for as long as I can remember, and have used it casually over the years.

With more time on my hands after the big "R", there are a number of ideas I want to develop in part using SolidWorks.

So the thought a PDM type tool has reared it's ugly head. SolidWorks PDM is not feasible as I'm not ponying up for that, and I'm on my last year of subscription. At this point I'm looking for a tool for version control. If other capabilities come with it, that's a bonus.

I've used SVN via Tortoise SVN as a quasi PDM system in the past, and while it worked, it really isn't designed to manage binary files. It's my fall back plan as I've got a Netgear NAS that once hosted SVN in the past.

Any thoughts about other solutions? Not adverse to standing up a local server to host a PDM.

cheers,

[Frederick_Law]

If only you are are using SW, why would you need PDM?
Just save a copy of the old "rev".
Or copy whole assembly to another folder.

[SPerman]

That might be good advice if SW weren't so good at searching your hard drive for "missing" files. All of a sudden your "archived" files are now being used in an assembly.

[gerard]

If only you are are using SW, why would you need PDM?
Just save a copy of the old "rev".
Or copy whole assembly to another folder.

That might be good advice if SW weren't so good at searching your hard drive for "missing" files. All of a sudden your "archived" files are now being used in an assembly.

This. It's taken me literally years to chase down all the dupes on our work system, which obviously has no PDM.

You never knew which version you were getting.

Would like to have just a wee bit more control than that.

cheers

g

[Frederick_Law]

Each part and assembly file has Revision.
Fill that in and add Revision to Titleblock and BOM/partlist.
Another way is also add Rev to file name.

I keep filename with no rev as current.
So if current is 01, I'll have a file with 00 at the end.
Or R00.
This way you don't break the assemblies.
Problem is you don't really have a rev assembly.
You could copy and rev the assembly if you want.

For personal work, keep it simple.

Dupe in work is totally different thing.
Same name different part.
Same part different name.
Same part different folder.
You name it.
The possibility is endless.

[mp3-250]

if your business or company allow a "one shot" approach to projects,
you could save all the files in one folder, pack them and forget them.
Injection molds, custom build things etc.
If you have a standard lineup of complex machinery with sub units and you want to revision everything lIke us you need a sort of pdm system.
a single machine is over 10k parts, including revision we have more than a million files inside the vault.
close than 100 workstations and with different dept sharing data.
we still have the save the old file with the revision name approach... and you will never know where the latest version would be or the cross references are going to blowup in your face.
we had/have this approach for the 2D system. another mess.

pdm is not cheap, but it must work for your needs.

[rodface]

I have often thought that I would be very happy with using PDM Standard as a version control system for not only CAD files but also for resumes, tax forms, photos, you name it. It would be nice to be able to acquire a "home use" license for it. It would be nice to find an alternative that uses the same principle of a SQL backend and file archive. Git and the like have the aforementioned issues with being better at handling text files than they are at handling binaries. Furthermore the Git workflow and its data handling concepts have never really made as much sense to me as the traditional CAD/PDM concepts (checking in, checking out, etc.) The whole mess of commits, pushing, pulling, merging, squashing, etc. are a bit off-putting.

[zxys001]

I have often thought that I would be very happy with using PDM Standard as a version control system for not only CAD files but also for resumes, tax forms, photos, you name it. It would be nice to be able to acquire a "home use" license for it. It would be nice to find an alternative that uses the same principle of a SQL backend and file archive. Git and the like have the aforementioned issues with being better at handling text files than they are at handling binaries. Furthermore the Git workflow and its data handling concepts have never really made as much sense to me as the traditional CAD/PDM concepts (checking in, checking out, etc.) The whole mess of commits, pushing, pulling, merging, squashing, etc. are a bit off-putting.

I do not use PDM but you got me thinking of some colaboration/version control alternatives and wonder how useful they are or have evolved?

https://gotomation.info/2020/01/svn-or- ... olidworks/

Looks like the freebies are doing it as well.
https://github.com/grd/FreePDM

[Frederick_Law]

A "third party" PDM will not be able to read anything from CAD, PDF etc.
It's just a database allow user to add "notes" about the file attached.

Also with PDM, it can keep all versions of the file but you can only use one at a time. Saving files with rev in name will allow opening multiple versions.

It's like Apple files system.
You save a song on you iPod. The file got named an ID number. Song name, Singer and everything else are saved in a DB.
Without the DB program, you'll have no idea which file is which. Until you open each one and check.

[CT-Simo]

Take a look at CUSTOMTOOLS. It does not "own" or have file versioning of the files like PDM and SVN has, but it does indexing so you can search your files. It also does automatic filenaming based on Custom Properties, and you can create rules like when revision property is bumped-up (A -> B), the file will automatically be saved with the new name (12345-A.sldprt -> 12345-B.sldprt). It also handles copying the referenced drawing for the new revision etc.

Pair with scheduled back-up routines and you've got yourself a very affordable yet still extremely powerful SW file management system.

CUSTOMTOOLS has tons of features, but Basic edition would be enough for you, if you are just looking for file management: https://www.customtools.info/en/pricing/

Here's a quite recent video showcasing CUSTOMTOOLS. Francois, our Sales Manager, did very nice work with the demo

[bnemec]

Greetings all,

I'm about 6 weeks away from retiring from my "day" job.

I've had a seat of SolidWorks standard for as long as I can remember, and have used it casually over the years.

With more time on my hands after the big "R", there are a number of ideas I want to develop in part using SolidWorks.

So the thought a PDM type tool has reared it's ugly head. SolidWorks PDM is not feasible as I'm not ponying up for that, and I'm on my last year of subscription. At this point I'm looking for a tool for version control. If other capabilities come with it, that's a bonus.

I've used SVN via Tortoise SVN as a quasi PDM system in the past, and while it worked, it really isn't designed to manage binary files. It's my fall back plan as I've got a Netgear NAS that once hosted SVN in the past.

Any thoughts about other solutions? Not adverse to standing up a local server to host a PDM.

cheers,

After reading your post again I'm wondering if you have done any computer programming. One potential, and very hack/rudimental, possibility comes to mind. I'm assuming you're one man CAD band now after the big "R"? Without working through the details one quick and dirty solution might be to write a service that runs on your workstation on login. It would implement a file system watcher (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotne ... ew=net-7.0) on the local directory where you save your CAD files. Then listen to the create and modify events and copy the new file to a file server on your LAN, preferably with some form of fault tolerant RAID such as 1 or 5. It would need to add suffix to the "version" stored on the file server, simply adding datetime to the end of filename would be simplest. If you want sequential version numbers the best would probably be to add some kind of SQL into the mix so that there's a version counter for each filename.

- I would let the versioning service raise holy heck if it finds a duplicate file name. This may seem like a hassle, but would save you in long run.
- The folder structure on your file server could just mirror your local working folder structure or implement some balancing scheme.
- You want to resist temptation to open files directly from the file server, would defeat the purpose.
+ I would probably set permissions on the root archive in file share to read only for most and only have one user I create with write access. Then set up the versioning service to run as that user instead of logged in user.

As long as you don't need all the other bells and whistles that would do. I would probably use MySQL to index the files and provide version numbering. Then another table for file to file refs just for the sake of where used searching. Could eventually try to add function beyond that if you have too much time on your hands. I think you can change/replace file refs using Document Manger API so there could be a path to mass where used replace and filename or path updates if you record the file refs. Sounds like fun to me.

[gerard]

hey Ben,

Mostly what I write now is VBA for use in SolidWorks. Prolly not directly applicable in this specific instance.

If I was to go down this path, I would leverage as much existing code and capability as I could.

The innerweb spelunking I've done indicates that SVN is the "preferred" version control system. Others (GIT, etc) don't seem to handle large binary files anywhere near as well.

I would combine this with some of the capability from https://github.com/AmpScm/SharpSvn.

There is also some precursory thoughts about doing this here; https://github.com/autolycus/SolidworkSVN albeit very old

The beauty of the SVN solution is I've already done it in the past. With https://tortoisesvn.net/ it's merely setting everything up, and then usage. I've run SVN on my now ancient ReadyNAS NAS box in the past, and it simply works once it's set up.

Once done, I can start to think about leveraging the SharpSVN and SolidWorksSVN work when I have time.

thanks

[SPerman]

Have you looked at this?

viewtopic.php?p=27453&hilit=version#p27453 "Revision control app macro"

[gerard]

A bit. I need to study it to see if it's a viable solution.

thanks