Team 254 Open-Source Release: Cheesy Parts

[Jon Jack]

Originally Posted by brennonbrimhall

Forgive me – as I'm a programmer first and foremost, and know next to nothing about Solidworks (we use Autodesk) – but couldn't you do something with git? It might be easier than interfacing with PDM – as there are plenty of projects like Github, Gitorious, Gitlab, etc. which could be used as a reference point. You could even update the status of each part by a prefix in the commit message or something. Just a thought.

If you were interested in just checking in and out files, then yes you could use Git. However, Git is intended to be used with text files, not binary files like the ones created by SolidWorks.

In SolidWorks different files are associated with each other. For example, an Assembly will have many parts associated with it. Git has no way of recognizing these types of relationships. So if I'm using Git and I wanted to check out an assembly and all the parts associated with it, then I'd have to manually check out each part. If I wanted to do this in PDM then all I'd have to do is check out the assembly and check a box that checks out all associated files.