From the course: SOLIDWORKS: File References

Replacing components - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: File References

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Replacing components

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- [Instructor] Now in a previous video, we showed how using the open dialog box we can essentially replace components inside of assemblies. Here I wanna go through the formal replace component feature and show how we can verify what we've done looking back at our references. So here I've got this body two file that I wanna replace with a regular body file. So I'm gonna right click on it, and I don't have the option automatically shown here, so I'm gonna go down, and you can see as I expand it, the Replace Components, let's do that one more time. So as I originally right click, I don't get all the options, but as I click on the Expand option, Replace Components shows up. You can go ahead and customize that if you want by hitting Customize Menu and then going to Replace Components and turning that on so it shows up every time. That's a feature that by default is always off, but you should really turn it on 'cause you're gonna use it often. So now I'm gonna right click on more time, hit Replace Components, and here you see the body that we wanna replace. I'm gonna browse, find the body that I wanna replace it with, hit Open. You can choose all instances here, so if you have, for example, a set of bolts that you wanna replace, you wanna go from an N4 to an N5, you can select that here and select all instances and it'll copy all of them and re-drop them in. And I'll just go ahead and hit the green check mark okay. It replaced all of the mates that were inside of the assembly in all the locations. Not a problem. Hit green and now I've replaced this. Now if I go down to Find References, I can see that the body part is now listed here again instead of the body two part. So I'll go ahead and click Close, hit Save, and now we've changed that file reference and replaced that component.

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