SolidWorks® Administration Bible

Chapter 14. Establishing Best Practice Rules

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding best practice

• Setting up best practice for sketches

• Finding out best practice for features

• Using best practice in assemblies

• Regulating in-context best practice

As you know by now, establishing best practice rules is a good starting place for modeling standards. This may explain in part why modeling standards are so difficult to write, because best practice rules tend to be self-contradictory and change from situation to situation.

One could argue that the entire SolidWorks software came into being at the cusp of the conflict between fast-and-loose modeling methods and robust conservative methods employed by Pro/ENGINEER. Pro/ENGINEER was always recognized as powerful software, but it required a lot of training, was not particularly easy to use, and required the user to conform to the Pro/E process. The ease-of-use concept was promoted by the less expensive, less training intensive, mid-range CAD software that came into existence in the mid-1990s. Of course, ease-of-use won that particular war. Best practice promises to bring SolidWorks back full circle, recognizing that there was indeed some value in the more methodical way of doing things. If you have ever made a model and had it fall apart the first time you made a change to it that wasn't necessarily part of the plan, you are a victim of this fast-and-loose legacy.

In this chapter, I present a higher-level discussion of several best practice topics but do not ...