As we said in part 1 of this series, SOLIDWORKS Inspection provides unique manufacturing and quality control solutions designed to standardize and automate common inspection processes, including the creation and publication of ballooned/bubbled manufacturing drawings and inspection reports in a variety of customizable formats such as AS9102, PPAP and Process Performance.

Here, we continue with the basic steps for using the Inspection add-in for SOLIDWORKS CAD, which is designed to work with SOLIDWORKS 2D drawings as well as 3D CAD models directly (Professional version only).

Setting Extraction Preferences

Be on the lookout for a small blue right-facing arrow at the top-right of the dialog used to create your Inspection Project. This is a multi-page dialog, and the second page allows you to adjust the criteria that will be used to extract characteristics from the drawing.

Use the available checkboxes throughout this dialog to control which types of characteristics should be extracted from the drawing. There are many sub-options to further control which characteristics are captured, and which are filtered out. For example, checking the Include checkbox for Dimensions and leaving all sub-options unchecked would result in automatically extracting all dimensions except for reference and basic dimensions, which are not included by default. Checking the Inspection Only box in addition to Include would extract only dimensions marked with an inspection circle in SOLIDWORKS. The differences can be seen below:

The Notes section of Extraction Setting contains a couple options worth investigating, as well. Checking the box for Sheet Format will extract notes contained within the sheet format, often associated with the title block of a drawing. The auto-explode checkbox controls the grouping behavior of multiline notes. If enabled, each line of a multiline note will be treated as an individual characteristic. If disabled, the entire note will be treated as a single item.

Finally, the Notes section contains an Extraction Criteria field which contains a regular expression for interpreting the formatting of notes. While it is not advised for inexperienced users to adjust this expression, those wishing to learn more can visit the Help File on Note Extraction Criteria.

Like the Notes section, the Hole Callouts section also contains a checkbox for Auto-explode, which controls how the various components of a hole callout will be treated. If enabled, each individual component of a hole callout (such as counterbore diameter, counterbore depth, hole depth, etc.) will be treated individually. If disabled, the entire hole will be considered as a single characteristic.

Finally, the Sheets section (introduced in SOLIDWORKS Inspection 2023) can be used to control which sheets the characteristic extraction will be applied to. This can be particularly useful for multipage or multi-project drawings, where only a single sheet or a select number of sheets are applicable to the Inspection Project. This section also includes controls for characteristic sequencing, which can be customized.

Tolerance Settings

The final page of this dialog (again accessed with the right-facing arrow) allows you to customize the default tolerances that will be applied to any characteristics that do not already have an explicit tolerance assigned to them. Options are available to select between tolerances based on precision or range, set units and assign different tolerances to linear and angular dimensions. The plus and minus tolerances fields can be manually adjusted, and while they are not required to match the tolerances specified in the title block of the drawing, this is most often the case. You will need to update these tolerance values to match your company standards.

Extracting Characteristics

Once all Project Settings have been applied, click the green checkmark to confirm. Keep in mind that if these options need to be adjusted, the Edit Inspection Project command can be used to change Project, Extraction and Tolerance settings at any time. Additionally, these settings can be saved to an Inspection Project template file to avoid repeating this (often tedious) task. Once confirmed, simply select the Create New Template command and provide a suitable file name.

If you have selected Automatic Extraction, confirming the Inspection Project options will immediately initiate the extraction process according to the extraction criteria. The SOLIDWORKS Inspection tab will take the place of the PropertyManager, displaying a table containing all of the extracted characteristics along with a list of properties associated with the currently selected characteristic.

We will be discussing these two windows in-depth in the following sections, but first we must consider the manual extraction approach. Manual extraction can be particularly useful when only a limited number of characteristics are required. Especially in large or complex drawings, automatic extraction can often “over-extract” and provide many unnecessary characteristics, requiring significant cleanup in order to produce a reasonable ballooned drawing or report.

If manual extraction is specified during project setup, clicking the green checkmark only confirms the project settings and does not extract any characteristics. However, a new command becomes available which is grayed out and not useable during automatic extraction.

Clicking the Add Characteristic command will turn it on and keep it active until it is clicked again, allowing you to select any characteristic within your drawing to extract it. This includes dimensions, notes, geometric tolerances, weld symbols and any other available annotation data. Each annotation you select will be added to the Characteristic Table and organized within the left pane of the screen.

If the Auto Balloon checkbox was enabled in Project Settings prior to using the Add Characteristics command, each annotation will automatically receive a balloon as it’s extracted. If this option was left unchecked, the extraction will still occur, but balloons will need to be added manually using the Add/Edit Balloons command. This command can be used to add and edit the properties/positioning of balloons/bubbles en masse.

It should be noted that balloons/bubbles are organized by default in a separate drawing layer which can be shown/hidden independently from other drawing information. The Layers dialog can also be used to adjust the color of the balloons, if desired.

While automatic and manual extraction techniques cannot currently be mixed in the SOLIDWORKS Inspection Add-in, it is possible to “turn off” any unnecessary characteristics, which is particularly helpful during automatic extraction. Simply right-click a characteristic in the table and deselect “Selected for Inspection.” Though the characteristic will still be listed in the table, it will not be assigned an ID or balloon number and will not appear in any reports published from the project. If you need to turn a characteristic back on, simply reverse this process.

Characteristics in the table can be reordered and modified with respect to grouping. To change the order and corresponding number of a characteristic, simply click and drag it into another position within the table. This technique can also be performed with groups of characteristics by using Shift or Control to select multiple characteristics first. Note that grouped characteristics with detailed numbering (such as 4.1, 4.2, etc.) cannot be moved outside of their group.

Grouped characteristics often occur from annotations with a quantity specified or multiline notes. To adjust grouping behavior, all characteristics within the group must be selected using Shift or Control and then right clicked. The Grouping flyout provides several options to group/ungroup characteristics with various accompanying balloon schemes.

To learn more about the specific behavior of each of these options, consider visiting the SOLIDWORKS Inspection Help File on Using the Bill of Characteristics.

Part 1 of this SOLIDWORKS Inspection Add-In series can be read here, and Part 3 here.