Bye Check-Out-On-The-Fly

If you’re an experienced SmarTeam CAD integration user, you may be familiar with SmarTeam’s Check Out ‘on the fly’ functionality. This feature senses whether documents are Checked Out as you modify them, warns you if they are not Checked Out, and allows you to instantly check them out as you modify them.

In SmarTeam V5R16 and earlier versions, this function popped up a warning prompting you every time you modified a document that was not checked out. This is a convenient feature if you want to save every change you make to an assembly, but can be an annoyance if you’re only performing experiments or have a very large assembly.

Stop. Look! What’s that Sign? In V5R17 and V5R18, SmarTeam has changed this functionality in the SolidWorks integration. Instead of interrupting you once for every read-only file that is modified, you will see a small window appear at the bottom of the SolidWorks application with a red stop sign. The message in this window will read something like:

“SolidWorks Assembly “MyFile.sldasm A.1 has been modified. Click here, or run ‘Modified Components’ command to repair.”
This warning appears and disappears without interrupting your work. If you see this, do not be alarmed. This is normal, and doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem. You may also notice changes in the SmarTeam Data Manager Tree (DMT). A red circle with a green exclamation point will appear on any components, which have been changed.

Another part of this new approach to managing changed files in the SolidWorks Integration is the ”Show Modified Components” dialog box. This dialog box is accessible from the SmarTeam menu in SolidWorks when the integration is active. When you activate this window, you will be shown a list of all the components that have been modified.

As you select each component, you see a list of messages in the Incident Reports area, which is located at the bottom of the Modified Components dialog box. When a component is selected, you will get a list of errors and warnings, detailing the changes SmarTeam has detected for the component. For instance, if the selected component is checked in, and has been modified, the Incident Reports might include messages telling you that the Checked In document has been modified or that a read-only copy of the document in your working folder has been modified. By default, the Action that is listed is Check Out. When you right-click on the item in the Repair list, you see a list of options for how you can change the Action resolve these warnings. You options are to:

Check Out/New Release to check out the document so that you can retain any changes you are making as a new revision of the document in the vault
Get the latest version from the vault
Reload the version that is in the vault
Ignore the warning
No Operation (do nothing)

After you select how you want to change the actions, you can click the Repair button to perform the selected actions on each of the components. These features are much less intrusive and allow you to be more productive when using the SolidWorks Integration.

Tags: assembly management, CAD, CAD integration, check out, ENOVIA SmarTeam, Incident Reports, integration, on the fly, PDM, SmartTeam, SolidWorks, solidworks components