Recent content by stepalibre

Alibre Design running remotely or in VMs is a possible alternative to a native app. As a fruit based computer user that dual boots Win10 and use Linux (GUI/CLI) for development on win and mac I see all sides. AD V27 runs on Win11 in a VM with low specs extremely well. Yes, memory and GPU...

I need to clarify that, of course the Alibre file contents can be read directly in code. I don't want to take this approach to be on the safe side.

Thanks for sharing details, as we all learn and work through problems. This detour into reading Alibre files is very interesting. Reading the files should be safe to do when only dumping the plain text contents to a file. This is 20x faster than running headless to get the same or similar data...

To get constituents using OpenMcdf: Sub Main(args As String()) Dim target As CFStream = GetTargetStream() If target Is Nothing OrElse Not target.IsStream Then Console.WriteLine("Only stream data can be exported") Return End If Dim sanitizedFileName As String =...

Version comment? You can make a custom version comment: PartSession.DesignProperties.CustomProperty("Version Comment") PartSession.DesignProperties.CustomProperty("Version Comment","Version is updated")

You are correct, I used to save Alibre files as OLE objects in office documents. @cadtec's approach is likely similar, a view of the database: https://www.alibre.com/forum/index.php?threads/zdb-pdm-for-alibre-design-and-atom3d.22283/ I wonder what is gained by not using the API if the same...

I try to avoid false positives.

The DesignProperties APIs are also useful and worth considering. I make use of CustomProperties in my tools as a way to check versions and revisions.

You can read from Alibre files and save to a file or database any data you want to detect a change. This is more work but you can read and write anything. Here is my project for writing sketch data to plain text files...

Yes, or don't use packages. If users are on the same network this is not a problem. If you rely on packages then, you'll need to save the files to update the ConstituentFilePaths. But again this all depend on your application and goals. When using a package all the files will be included in the...

The packager saves assemblies and parts to a temp folder @ AppData\Local\Temp\PackageTempFolder0 then creates the zip/Alibre Package and copies it to your folder. The ConstituentFilePaths don't update until the files are saved to disk.

You have to save the files again to fix the ConstituentFilePaths: Package with wrong ConstituentFilePaths: Package with right ConstituentFilePaths after save as:

Yes. I noticed references/ConstituentFilePaths don't match until you save/regen/deep regen/update the files locally from packages. This is likely a bug in packages and/or the API.

No, only if changes have been made in-between your code being run. If users are accessing files this can cause problems when your code accesses the same files. This type of work is best done off-hours when no one is working. Or you could restrict file/project access while your application is in use.

Alibre Help GPT is essentially a search engine for Alibre Help that only return web links. I now have more ideas and improvements since this last update for a more formal search engine GPT. There's a lot of overlap between a search engine and LLMs. I use LLMs as a programmable search engine.