It is possible to customize the miniPDM SolidWorks Add-in to fit your needs. The settings are presented as a datagrid where the variable names can be modified and some application settings can be enabled or disabled.

Note that some settings are dependent on other settings and can only be activated if certain conditions are met.

Application

The following settings define the configuration of the add-in itself. These should be setup once and kept for consistency.

Note that these settings are shared across all the miniPDM add-ins but not across all the database user as some might want to be able to configure their miniPDM independently of the rest of the user pool.

Database Location

You can either copy-paste the path of the Access database file here or click on “…” on the right side of the cell to browse to the file. To learn more about this setting please check the article about the miniPDM Database.

External Unique Identifier Generator

In the future, it will be possible to use an external program to generate the Unique Identifier to allow more customization. For the moment you can keep the default setting on False. For more information, see the article about the Unique Identifier.

Force Upper Case

This setting can force all the SolidWorks file properties, custom and configurations, to be converted to upper case for format consistency in the drawings and BOMs. Select True in the dropdown menu to activate this option.

Shared Settings

If this setting is set to True, the settings stored in the database will overwrites the one stored in the application. This is an easy way to make sure all the users uses the same settings to have consistency.
When set to False, the settings will be only stored in the application.
Note that a database is required to activate this setting.
If a settings does not exists in the database but exists in the application, it will be written in the database. This is particularly useful when creating the shares settings for the first time before sharing it with others.

Variables

This section defines the SolidWorks properties’ variables names that the add-in read / writes. The names can contain spaces and can be different than the ones in the miniPDM Excel Add-in.

It is advised to define once and for all these variables names otherwise a BOM containing old ans new components will have empty values in the cells where the variable names don’t exist.

Description

The Description is the name of a component which is different from a Part Number. The variable name should be “Description” as this variable is used in SolidWorks, PDM and Windows Explorer. For more information see the article about the Description Property.

Notes

The Notes variable is used to store extra information that does not belong to the Description or the Manufacturer Reference.

For example it can be some electrical specification for a motor, some alternate part numbers or SKU, hyperlinks, etc…

Manufacturer Reference

The Manufacturer Reference commonly named Part Number can be different or not from the Unique Identifier depending if the component is internal or external, see the Definition of the Word Component article. You might have chosen to assign the Unique Identifier as Manufacturer Reference for your internal components but for external components it has to be the unique designation the manufacturer used to identifier its component. Indeed the manufacturer has no idea what your Unique Identifier represents. The Manufacturer Reference is the identification that you put in a purchase order to get a specific component.

Unique Identifier

As discussed previously on the External Unique Identifier Generator paragraph, this chain of characters is used to uniquely define a component so that no other component in the whole company CAD has the same identifier.