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Saving as old version

Jake_Steidy

Senior Member
Hello all,

Curious if there is any way to save a part in Alibre as an older version, running v26 and wants to save as v25? I don't think there is this capability but wanted to check the community.

Thanks,
Jake
 

simonb65

Alibre Super User
Curious if there is any way to save a part in Alibre as an older version, running v26 and wants to save as v25?
As @DavidJ says, the short answer is NO.

The long answer is that you can't save data that represents a model and the features used to construct that model in an older format that has no knowledge of what those newer features and data structures mean! i.e. v24 has no way to understand what 3d wrapping is or how to handle a feature that contains the data to do it, so you can't just ignore it otherwise the geometry will have a intermediate step missing in it's process ... and so, any post feature that was dependant on that is now broken!

There will be data in v26 that v25 either doesn't understand or that the same data used by v26 is now used differently as part of improvements or enhancements.

Backward compatibility is only really achievable when you have a dataset that is not 100% inter dependant on other data in the dataset. i.e. MS Excel can be saved as an older version, but you loose certain cell formatting or macro expressions. In the latter case the sheet still shows with an error in the cell formula, but that is generally not catastrophic to drawing and importing the rest of the sheet data!

Most applications that have bespoke datasets that require processing once the data is loaded in, in my experience, tends not to have options to export to older versions, and in my line of work, that's quite a few applications!
 

Jake_Steidy

Senior Member
Thanks guys, confirmed my suspicions.

I mean I haven't used a different CAD software in a few years now, but I remember that Autocad, and possibly even Solidworks had the ability to save as previous versions (those are the 2 that I have used heavily previously)(and maybe this is more easily to occur on Autocad or Solidworks because of the structure of their updates?)? Like if an Alibre part doesn't use the new features of v26, what would be stopping Alibre from saving in an older version? (Just a thought question, not necessarily wanting it as a change to occur) I guess some inability would come from the way things are solved if there was an enhancement or improvement as you noted Simon from one version to the next.

Not something I run into at any frequency, but maybe others see it more and work around using the STEP data.

Best,
Jake
 
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