The biggest Drew update in years

This update for our drawing automation add-in Drew turned out bigger than expected. We just kept building cool stuff.

But after about 1000 hours, it’s done now. We just released many of the features and bug fixes our users asked for.

Let’s show you what we’ve built.

1. Edit existing drawings

Drew was built for creating SOLIDWORKS drawings from scratch. Starting a drawing takes many clicks, and most of these clicks are the same for every drawing. Select a drawing template, select a sheet format, add views, outer dimensions, blocks, notes.

But Drew was not very good at editing existing drawings. This is because we know everything about your drawing and its views when we create it, but we lose that knowledge when you close the drawing.

That changes with this update. When you now open a drawing, we analyze the drawing, its sheets and its views to make editing possible. That allows you to add and remove views like it is a brand-new drawing. Even AutoFit often works.

There are still a few limitations, but this is only the first version. We will keep on improving the editing capabilities of Drew.

2. Add hole callouts automatically

We added automatic ordinate dimensions for holes a year ago and promised that hole callouts were next. Hole callouts are a great SOLIDWORKS feature because they combine the size, depth, size and quantity of a hole. We’re big fans.

This update adds support for adding hole callouts automatically. Just select a view, click Add hole callouts in the task pane and BAM, you’re done.

We don’t automatically add hole callouts or ordinate dimensions to a new drawing because we think you should decide which view needs these dimensions.

3. Five new table types

For years, Drew only supported two table types: bill of materials and cut lists. We have now added support for all other table types (except punch tables because nobody seems to use them). Drew now supports:

1. Bend tables (new)
2. Bill of materials
3. Cut lists
4. General tables (new)
5. Hole tables (new)
6. Revision tables (new)
7. Weld tables (new)

You store your preferred table templates (and many other settings) in each Blueprint. We even removed some arbitrary restrictions: you can now have multiple tables of the same type. You can also give each table a friendly name to keep them apart.

When you are working on a drawing, we show your tables in the task pane. We only show you the table types that work for the active model and the current open mode. That means we hide cut lists for assembly drawings and hide many table types when in Detailing mode.

Click once to add the table at its preferred position. Click again to delete the table.

4. Sheet name improvements

One of Drew’s best features is the ability to add body sheets: a sheet for each unique body in a multi-body part. It’s the definition of our one-click magic : click once to add a sheet (with views, notes, dimensions) for each body.

And if you later change the part and come back to the drawing, just click again to add the missing sheets.

We have made two improvements to the names of these sheets:

4.1. Use body names for sheet names

You can now use the name of the body for body sheets and flat pattern sheets.

4.2. Keep body sheet names in sync with the part

We added the ability to keep the names of all body sheets in sync with the part. This setting is available when you select one of these three body sheet name options:

1. Use body name
2. Use cut list folder name
3. Use custom property from cut list folder

Every time a drawing (that uses the selected blueprint) becomes active, we refresh the sheet names of all body sheets.

5. Detailing mode and all his friends

5.1. Detailing mode support

When SolidWorks creates a drawing view, it never converts your model to 2D. It’s easier to just show you a side view of your model. That means that your drawing is literally an assembly underwater. Every view adds a component to the drawing assembly. The sheet is just another component, and they disable rotation to prevent you from seeing that. If you want to learn more, check out I think SOLIDWORKS drawings are assemblies – and it blew my mind.

But now we have Detailing Mode. This mode finally converts your 3D model into a real 2D view with just lines. And according to our research on LinkedIn (you can follow us there), 50% of all users regularly use Detailing mode. So it was time to add support to Drew.

Boy, that wasn’t easy. Detailing mode seems so simple: it opens the drawing, but not the underlying model. But SOLIDWORKS hasn’t documented its behavior at all regarding the API. We just had to try out everything ourselves.

You cannot just add any view. Some views just fail to add, others fail once then work the second time. Some tables fail to add, some work fine. It’s a mess.

So be warned: Drew supports Detailing mode, but Detailing mode does not support every action.

5.2 Open any model (or drawing) in any open mode

You may have already spotted a change in the Open model button at the top of the task pane. We have added an expand button to the right side of this button. Click this to view all available open modes for the related drawing, part or assembly.

If you have a part or assembly open, we show you three ways to open the related drawing:

1. Resolved
2. Lightweight
3. Detailing

If you have a part drawing open, we show you two ways to open the related part:

1. Resolved
2. Quick view

If you have an assembly drawing open, we show you three ways to open the related assembly:

1. Resolved
2. Lightweight
3. Large design review

If you want to learn more about these open modes and how they influence performance, check out our ebook Secrets to SOLIDWORKS Performance.

There is one limitation: if you click the button to open a file in a certain mode while it is already open in another mode, we activate the document that is already open. It’s not possible to switch an open document to another mode.

6. New variables for smart exports

Our Smart Exports have received lots of attention too. These exports let you build an export path using variables from the drawing or model. With those settings, you can export the current model with just one click.

The main thing is that we added a window to create these settings. Click any of the buttons in the list to add a tag to the path builder.

6.1. Use custom properties from the part or assembly for drawings

We already supported using custom properties from the active model. We changed the tag for these variables from “<CustomProperty(name goes here)>” to “<Prp(name goes here)>” so it’s consistent with SOLIDWORKS.

New in this version is the <PrpModel> tag. This tag is for drawings only and it lets you read a custom property from the part or assembly in the drawing.

6.2. Revision tag

Another new tag for drawings: <Revision> reads the latest revision from the revision table on your drawing. This one was requested by users that did not store the revision in a custom property.

6.3. Using optional prefixes

You may have noticed that the <Prp> tag appears many times in the list above. That is because we now support four optional prefixes:

1. Dash
2. Dot
3. Space
4. Underscore

Three tags support the prefixes:

1. <Prp>
2. <PrpModel>
3. <Revision>

Custom properties often have no value, like the revision of a new drawing. If you would use a dash with the revision, your filename would end up as “Part-.sldprt”. But when you now enter this prefix inside the tag, we only add the prefix+value when the property has a value.

So if your export path (say, for a DXF) would be: <Directory>\<Filename><-Revision>

The results would be:

1. When the revision is empty:
   • C:\Test\Drawing.DXF
2. When the revision is “A”:
   • C:\Test\Drawing-A.DXF

It’s a simple feature, but a useful one.

6.4. Export only flat pattern sheets to DXF

This one was pretty hard for us. A customer asked us if Drew could only export Flat pattern sheets to DWG/DXF. That seemed like a reasonable request, so we started building. But SOLIDWORKS does not let you select which sheets to export to DXF, that only happens for PDFs (because they are ‘printed’, probably?).

So we had to figure out a few new tricks. We now override your DXF export settings (only during our export), export all pages to DXF, then remove the unnecessary ones. And now all the complexity is hidden from you, the user.

There are two caveats:

1. This only works for DXFs because they are text files. DWG files are binary so we cannot edit them without a tool like AutoCAD.
2. It deletes the embedded previews from the DXF. I don’t consider this bad because the files get way smaller, but you can decide for yourself.

7. Improvements to the Batch panel

People have quickly started using the Batch panel that we introduced in the previous Drew update. We have now made two major improvements (and a few minor ones we won’t go into detail here):

7.1. Added a task for saving the model

You probably know that a sheet metal part has a flat pattern configuration. But this configuration gets added by SOLIDWORKS when you add a flat pattern view in a drawing.

The batch panel did not take this into account. It would process the part first and the drawing second. So if the drawing added a part configuration, it would not get saved to the part.

So we have now added an extra task to save the model, after Export drawing. See the first red highlight in the image below.

7.2. Two extra filters

The row of filters, below the list of tasks, is a great way to quickly select the models or drawings you are looking for. To simplify creating or exporting drawings, we have added two more filters in this update:

1. Show models that need a drawing
2. Show models that have a drawing

You may think that one filter would be enough, but these two work great. So go try them out.

8. Parent-child views in the Settings window

We found a way to simplify the Settings window. Instead of showing all text inputs, checkboxes and dropdowns for each annotation (aka blocks and notes), we now show only the properties of the selected item.

Here you see the settings for the selected block:

We did the same thing in the Tables tab:

9. A streamlined toolbar

We finally figured out how to create flyouts in the SOLIDWORKS toolbars/tabs. So we added this knowledge to our open-source software SolidDNA and Drew.

There are flyouts for the three batch add sheet tools. Click the main button to add sheets of that type, you only need the flyout to delete all sheets of that type. This allowed us to delete our custom window to delete sheets.

Delete dangling also gets two flyouts, the first one deletes all dangling annotations from the current sheet and the second deletes all from the entire drawing.

10. Other improvements in this update

There are just so many. These are the improvements that will impact you the most:

1. Added support for SOLIDWORKS 2024. Updated the oldest supported version from SOLIDWORKS 2018 to 2019.
2. Changed the Add flat pattern button so you can click it again to remove the view.
3. Added a workaround for when Hidden Lines Visible doesn’t work on 3D views.
4. Split settings for adding outer dimensions and adding a sheet metal thickness dimension.
5. Added a Zoom To Fit after starting a drawing.

11. Bug fixes

We were able to fix quite a few bugs this time. We like to thank every user who reported an issue. Keep ’em coming, you are making Drew a better product for everyone!

• Fixed exporting the part’s drawing when exporting a DXF.
• Fixed exporting multiple sheets to DXF when the current sheet name is in de output path.
• Fixed only adding one dimension where there is one weldment view.
• Fixed adding a thickness dimension when there is a single sheet metal body.
• Fixed rotating the flat pattern view not exactly in steps of 90 degrees.
• Fixed flipped icons for Hidden Lines Visible and Hidden Lines Removed in the settings.
• Fixed missing export buttons in the Part/Assembly panel.
• Fixed missing headings in the Copy sheets for configurations window.
• Fixed the Blueprint Picker not doing anything when you click “Don’t use a blueprint”.
• Fixed loading DLLs when another add-in is active.
• Fixed toolbar tabs disappearing when another add-in becomes active.
• Fixed solidworks getting locked after adding body sheets for certain very old files.

12. What’s next?

Honestly, I need some time to figure out what’s next for Drew.

It’s not that we have no ideas, we just have to prioritize them. But there’s one big feature that I want to include: macros! I want to give you more freedom by running a macro during a batch, so you will be able to add your favorite macros to your Drew blueprints soon.

If you haven’t done so, go ahead and try out Drew for free 🙂