Tuesday December 1, 2015 at 4:51pm
SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler is a great tool to automatically do the work for us, available in all seats of Professional and Premium, we can set up the Scheduler to carry out mundane and monotonous tasks ahead of time.
SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler is a great tool to automatically do the work for us, available
in all seats of Professional and Premium, we can set up the Scheduler to carry
out mundane and monotonous tasks ahead of time.
In
this blog we are going to look at how the Task Scheduler can be used to
generate a drawing with views for us.
First
we need to create a drawing template with a series of pre-defined views. Create
a blank drawing and select Insert>Drawing
Views>Predefined. Place your first view on the drawing view and use the Projected View command to insert the
remaining views that you want SOLIDWORKS to pull through for you. Here I have
placed a Front view (Top Left) and going clockwise, a Right, Isometric and
Bottom view.
We now need
to save out the Drawing Template with the pre-defined views on them. Be sure to
select the Save as type to be ‘Drawing Templates (*.drwdot)’ and to
save into your usual template folder location.
With
our Drawing Template now saved out, we need to set up the Task Scheduler to
create our drawing. To find it, from your Start menu, navigate to All Programs>SOLIDWORKS>SOLIDWORKS
Tools>SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler.
The Task
Scheduler will look like the below image:
We want to
look to the tab on the left hand side, here are the series of tasks that we can
set the Scheduler to run, and in this instance we want the Create Drawings option.
The dialogue
box to set up the drawing creation will appear, we need to give the task a name
under Task Title, then select the
drawing template we created with the pre-defined views on them under Please input a drawing template with
predefined views: (use the Browse button and navigate to were the template
is saved). Next we need to select the part or assembly files that we want to
create drawings for, under the Task
files of folders section we have 2 options, Add File… where we can select individual files or Add Folder… where we can select an
entire folder at once. There are now 2 more optional steps to go over before we
are finished, the first is Task Schedule,
here we can define when we want the Task Scheduler to carry out this task,
by default it is set to immediately but we can define it to a certain time as
needed. We then need to define the Task
output folder, this will be the location in which the drawings will be
saved to.
If we then
click Finish the Schedule set up
will be complete, if we asked the Scheduler to run immediately SOLIDWORKS will
then begin automatically creating the drawings for us. Once finished (this
might take a few minutes if we have asked it to create a fair few drawings), we
can then navigate to the folder that we asked the drawings to be saved out to
and have a look at what has been created.
We now have a
drawing with some simple views that we can use to add annotations and
dimensions to as needed.
Hopefully
this shows the Task Scheduler as a useful tool to set up to run at the end of
each day after you have created your part so can get a nifty head start the
following morning when you’re creating the drawing.
Fin Jackson
Applications Engineer