Solidworks Inspection, anyone using?

[bnemec]

Is anyone using the Solidworks Inspection tools, either stand alone or add-in? We are looking at it and it looks good for ballooning pdfs for inspection. We would only be using the stand alone.

Our pdfs are not in the vault.
The Inspection Project files (,ixprj) would be in the vault for version history.

I cannot find any way to publish a pdf from inspection as an automated pdm task. Are there APIs for the stand alone so a pdf could be generated?

I'm also a bit skeptical about how checking the ixprj files into PDM will go if the input pdf is not in the vault.

So if anyone can share their experiences with Inspection we would be grateful.

Thank you.

[MJuric]

Is anyone using the Solidworks Inspection tools, either stand alone or add-in? We are looking at it and it looks good for ballooning pdfs for inspection. We would only be using the stand alone.

Our pdfs are not in the vault.
The Inspection Project files (,ixprj) would be in the vault for version history.

I cannot find any way to publish a pdf from inspection as an automated pdm task. Are there APIs for the stand alone so a pdf could be generated?

I'm also a bit skeptical about how checking the ixprj files into PDM will go if the input pdf is not in the vault.

So if anyone can share their experiences with Inspection we would be grateful.

Thank you.

See if you can get a "Trial Copy" from your VAR and try to do what you want to do first. The last place I worked used it and we ran into so many limitations and it being so inflexible that for some projects we just couldn't use it and for the rest of them we wanted to scream.

It's been 4-5 years now so I can't recall specifics, I just know the "Easy of ballooning" that was advertised never really came to fruition, at least for us and at that time.

[bnemec]

See if you can get a "Trial Copy" from your VAR and try to do what you want to do first. The last place I worked used it and we ran into so many limitations and it being so inflexible that for some projects we just couldn't use it and for the rest of them we wanted to scream.

It's been 4-5 years now so I can't recall specifics, I just know the "Easy of ballooning" that was advertised never really came to fruition, at least for us and at that time.

we've done that and the users (not CAD people) were able to get what they wanted rather efficiently. Now we're digging into the implementation details of how to maintain these things. Namely the input pdf, project file and the output pdf. We were planning on over writing the input pdf with the output pdf but sounds like that may not work.

I've learned over the past year or so that the problems are in the details and I'd really like to learn from others than buy it and identify the pitfalls one by one, again.

We have other systems for inspection reports and the like, we really just need the people maintaining control plans (not CAD users) to be able to balloon pdfs of new parts, and maintain the inspection pdfs as parts are revised. We need the balloons to not be renumbered each time, meaning the balloon number for a specific element does not change for the life of the part regardless of revisions. We need the inspection pdfs to be on a network share. We very much want the pdfs to be read only to all the users which is why I want a task to run the pdf as a special user account that has access to the network folder.

[MJuric]

we've done that and the users (not CAD people) were able to get what they wanted rather efficiently. Now we're digging into the implementation details of how to maintain these things. Namely the input pdf, project file and the output pdf. We were planning on over writing the input pdf with the output pdf but sounds like that may not work.

I've learned over the past year or so that the problems are in the details and I'd really like to learn from others than buy it and identify the pitfalls one by one, again.

We have other systems for inspection reports and the like, we really just need the people maintaining control plans (not CAD users) to be able to balloon pdfs of new parts, and maintain the inspection pdfs as parts are revised. We need the balloons to not be renumbered each time, meaning the balloon number for a specific element does not change for the life of the part regardless of revisions. We need the inspection pdfs to be on a network share. We very much want the pdfs to be read only to all the users which is why I want a task to run the pdf as a special user account that has access to the network folder.

Can't help with the PDM stuff because the company I worked at didn't have PDM at the time. I do know that one of the problems with the ballooning software was renumbering. Can't recall if we got that figured out or not. The main issue with that was we could print a PDF but when we wanted to make a change all the damn balloons would renumber.

Again, if I recall there was eventually a fix to that but can't remember. I also remember there being issues with adding balloons to things like notes, materials, heat treat etc.

I think we were "Early adopters" and hopefully most of that got worked out over the last 3-4 years.

[bnemec]

So just Matt used it years ago? Nobody else here used Inspection?

I'm told and it looks like the changing number issue is no longer an issue. We're not planning on using the auto balloon anyway, I never trust someone that uses "effortlessly" or "seamlessly" or "simply" when describing something they sell unless they've used it in a production setting for a while. Even then I've become a skeptic.