We have a few thousand parts, assemblies and drawings that were made using some really old SOLIDWORKS templates (from 1999-2000). Both the templates and the rest of the files been saved to more recent SOLIDWORKS versions over the years, but the age is apparent using the VersionHistory method and in the properties of the default planes.
From what I understand, there were some fundamental changes to SOLIDWORKS during these years. As we are the process of migrating this data to a new PDM server, and I’d like to fix this to be sure that it is not the source of some of our unresolved stability and performance issues.
Recreating these designs from scratch would be too time consuming, but I’m looking for a result equivalent to if these designs were made today with new templates. So my current ideas for a macro or add-in are:
Parts:
- Read the feature tree of existing parts and create new feature one-by-one a new file. Probably the safest option to avoid bringing any old data along.
- OR Insert old parts into new empty parts and break link. Easier, but not sure if this will bring along “old features” and potential issues.
Assemblies: Insert old assemblies into new assemblies and dissolve
Drawings: Copy views or entire sheets from old drawings into new drawings.
How would you go about this? Have you seen any existing migration tools/scripts that does something similar?
We are currently on 2024 SP5.0.