SolidWorks FeatureManager Management

In big parts and assemblies, you need to keep easy access to stuff in the list on the left. Whether it shows features or parts, you need to be able to find things easily. For this post, I’ve just listed a bunch of ways of managing whatever data is in the FeatureManager.

Hide/Show FeatureManager F9
One of the fastest ways to gain a lot of real estate in the graphics window is to press F9, which hides the entire FeatureManager. Once it’s hidden, you can also get it back by pressing F9 again.

Split FeatureManager
You can split the featuremanager area to show the featuremanager on the bottom and another panel like the configurationmanager on the top. You can move the propertymanager so that it is in a floating window.

Rollback/Roll Forward/Roll to Previous/Roll to End
Basic feature for going back in your design history.

Freeze Bar
This is the ultimate tool for people who complain about history. Well, sort of, but not really. Instead of rolling from the bottom like the Rollback bar, the Freeze bar rolls from the top. You can freeze features so that they do not change. In fact, you can take the frozen features and convert them into “dumb” bodies. In Solid Edge, this is essentially how Synchronous works, the initial body has no history, but after that, you can have history-based features. It helps you there, because you have real direct edit tools, but in SolidWorks, I’m not sure what the conversion to dumb bodies gets for you. This must be one of those competitive situations against Solid Edge where Works had to achieve some items on a check list, and they added it to the software even though its completely useless.

I do get the need for the freeze bar – because no one really wants to rely on a history-based model rebuilding, but I don’t get the dumbing down of data when you don’t have tools for dealing with dumb data.

You can use both Freeze and Rollback at the same time, but one can’t go past the other. They can, however meet in between two features.

Arrow Key Navigation
If you use the Rollback bar, you can then use the arrow keys up/down to scroll through the FeatureManager more easily.

Scroll Selected Item Into View
This is turned on (in Tools/Options) by default, so that if you select something in the graphics window, the FeatureManager will scroll up or down as necessary so you can see the item.

Use Transparent Flyout FeatureManager in Parts/Assemblies
I used to complain a lot. ;0) I used to complain a lot about stuff that didn’t make any sense, like when you go to edit or create a feature that requires the selection of something from the FeatureManager, but suddenly the PropertyManager shows up and you can’t access the FeatureManager any more. Geez, that used to burn me. I just got so frustrated, especially since I knew it was going to happen every time. Eventually I think they got sick of hearing me complain about it, and gave us a flyout FeatureManager so we could select stuff in the PropertyManager.

One thing you can do is to hide the main FeatureManager while using the transparent flyout featuremanager. This can be visually a little messy, but it gives you more room.

Display Pane
The display pane enables you to show/hide, change display style or transparency stuff in the featuremanger. Great tool. F8 to turn it on.

FeatureManager Filter
Works great for long featuremanagers, or big assemblies. This is another great reason to have good names or descriptions for items you’re going to access a lot.

Find/Go To
If you RMB on any feature in the featuremanger or the graphics window, you can select the Go To option, which brings up a dialog box which enables you to find a particular piece of text that may be in the featuremanager  somewhere. This is similar to the FeatureManager Filter in some ways. SolidWorks is somewhat famous for creating partially duplicate functionality.

Dynamic Reference Visualization
This has to be one of the most useful tools they’ve added recently. From any selected feature, it will show you parent (up the tree) and child (down the tree) features to help you troubleshoot nasty dependency issues. Can get distracting some times, so I’d put this one on a hotkey.

Flat Tree View
Flat tree view shows the features in the featuremanager in the literal order in which they were created, with no indentations, no absorptions, no history-based or parent/child or hierarchy shenanigans. Just a straight ordered list of your features. To access this view, RMB on the top level item (part name) in the featuremanager, and use the Tree Display flyout, to select the top item, which is Flat Tree View.

Use this for troubleshooting and editing especially when when using complex parent/child features like compound curves, sweeps, and anything with a sketch.

Breadcrumbs
Another one you have to use. This is still newish, so it might not have caught on yet for a lot of people. When you’re navigating a website, a breadcrumb display shows the hierarchy of the selections you have made to get where you are. It’s like Windows Explorer showing the path to the current folder. SolidWorks does the same thing. If you have a sketch in a part in a subassembly selected, the breadcrumb display shows this. Like the website or the Windows Explorer display, you can also navigate back up the crumb trail to select something specific, like a body or a feature that can’t necessarily be selected from the graphics window. This might take some practice, or watching someone else do it to get the value, but I think you’ll find this helps you navigate complex parts, but especially assemblies more efficiently.

History folder
This doesn’t have anything to with history-based history, as such, but it has to do with the history of the features or other items you have recently created, or edited. If you have a big assembly or part, this gives you easy access to things you have been working with.

Folders
You can create folders for features or parts or mates to help you organize items in the featuremanager.

There are a lot of options for things you can hide or display in the FeatureManager, and icons that indicate various situations. There are also tons of things you can find in the various RMB menus from the FeatureManager. That’s a different blog post. You can find all of this stuff in the SW help under the FeatureManager heading.