How to use Lightning with 3DEXPERIENCE

The best feature of the all-promising 3DEXPERIENCE platform is its PDM functionality. It lets you manage files, versions and releases without the need for a company server.

But SOLIDWORKS still runs locally, and will probably never be cloud-native. So your files need to be local as well.

That’s why you can use Lightning with 3DEXPERIENCE, with very little effort.

1. Upload your files

Whether you use your own fastener files or you use our Fastener Models Library, you first need to upload all your files to 3DEXPERIENCE.

If you bought our fasteners, please also upload the included XML files to automate the Lightning setup.

2. Add your files to the Design Library in SOLIDWORKS

After uploading your fasteners to the platform, you need to add a link to the files in SOLIDWORKS and keep that whole folder in sync.

To do this, click the Design Library tab, then click Add File Location. You can now select a folder/project on 3DEXPERIENCE with a button in the bottom left.

Once you do this, all your fastener files will be copied to your local drive and the folder will be kept in sync with the cloud. We now have everything in place to set up Lightning, assuming you already installed Lightning.

3. Identical paths for everyone

Lightning stores the complete path to all your files in its database. So that means all users need to have identical file paths to their fasteners.

You can read more about this in Lightning stores complete file paths.

4. The importance of filenames

Lightning works best when you keep the original filenames. But if you want to use unique numbers for filenames, you can also make that work with some extra effort.

When we create our fastener files for our library, we include all relevant size and material information in the filename. We extract this data from the filename during the Lightning setup process. You can read more about this at How to extract dimensions from filenames and configuration names.

But luckily, we also let you use configuration names and custom properties. And if all of that doesn’t work for you, you can still enter data manually. We explain it all in the link above.

5. Automate the Lightning settings with XML files

We told you to upload our XML files (when you bought our library) and to keep the filenames the same. This is all done so that we can automate the Lightning setup process for you, for about 99%.

When you add a folder with fasteners to Lightning, we look for an XML file in each subfolder and we use the contents of this file to extract data from filenames, configuration names or custom properties.

We explain everything in this article: Settings: each step explained.