Back in February, when I made my first attempt at creating multiple configurations for a part, some people warned me, with their own good reasons, that configurations are not really all that great, since they usually cause more trouble than they do help. Among those problems created by configurations, there was the one about not being able to tell what configuration had been used when creating a drawing. Well, back then I tried to create drawings using my configurations and I thought that there really was no way to get information about configurations being used from the drawing document. I just couldn’t figure out how. I recently learned that there is, indeed, a way to keep track of what configuration has been used in each view of the drawing, and there’s even a way to link the name of the configuration that was used to a note in the drawing, for added clarity. Of course, I’m talking about configurations for parts. I haven’t messed up with assemblies just yet.
So, this is what I’ve learned. When you insert a model view in a drawing, you can specify what configuration to use, simply by clicking on More Properties at the bottom of the dialog box. This will open the Drawing View Properties dialog box, and there, under Configuration Information, it will let you know what configuration is being used to create that particular view, and it will also allow you to select a different configuration from the drop-down list. If you ever wish or need to change the configuration later on, you can also access this dialog box by right-clicking on the view and selecting Properties from the menu. The following picture shows the two dialog boxes. In this example, configuration Size1 is chosen.
To link the name of the configuration to a note in the drawing, all you have to do is double-click the view before creating the note, so that the note is associated to that view. Then, create the note by clicking on Insert, Annotations, Note or clicking its icon from the Annotations Toolbar. On the Note property manager, click on Link to Properties. 
This will open a new dialog box that will prompt you to choose what property to link to the note, and where to get it from. In this case, we need to use custom properties from the Model in view to which the annotation is attached and the property we want to link is the configuration name.
This is what is called a parametric note, because it is linked to the value of a document property, a custom property, or a configuration specific property. If the value of this property changes (if we change the configuration), the text in the note will automatically update to show the new value.
High Gabi, you taught me some things about those mysterious Configurations. Thank you.
Posted by: Richard Williams | April 03, 2008 at 06:45 PM