Just finished a quarterly audit in SolidWorks PDM; 8% of our 12,300 assemblies had dangling refs after a folder restructure. What settings or tools have reduced this for you — enforcing relative paths, blocking renames on released files, or auto-repair on check-in — while keeping models easily accessible for downstream teams?
Seeing 8% after a “folder restructure” sounds familiar — switching to PDM’s Move Tree for all restructures (right‑click in the vault) cut ours to under 1% because it rewrites refs during the move. Caveat: it’s slower on big branches, so we queue them off‑hours. Are you moving with Move Tree or doing standard Windows moves?
Flipping on ‘don’t allow duplicate file names’ in the vault dropped our post‑restructure dangling refs to almost nil because nothing resolves to the wrong twin anymore; the caveat is a noisy one‑time cleanup for legacy vendor parts, but it’s been worth it — have you tried unique names yet, @tkim22?
Biggest win for us was setting PDM Admin > SOLIDWORKS > Referenced Documents to “Ignore SOLIDWORKS file locations” and ordering resolution to same folder → vault, plus unchecking SW’s “Search file locations for external references” so everything resolves inside the vault. Caveat: first opens run a bit slower until caches warm, and legacy jobs that relied on custom library paths may need a one‑time cleanup.
Bet a lot of that 8% after the restructure is library/Toolbox drift… We fixed it by pinning a Libraries/Toolbox folder at vault root, denying move/rename there, and turning off SOLIDWORKS ‘Search in subfolders for external refs’ so resolution sticks to the exact vault path; dangling refs dropped below 1%. Do you keep Toolbox in the vault or let clients point to a local copy?
One lever that paid off for us was a Dispatch pre-check-in that parses the Reference Tree and rejects the check-in if any path resolves outside the project root; it nudges users to fix refs in SOLIDWORKS first and cut our post-restructure dangles to about 1%. Pair that with ‘Update references on rename/move’ in PDM Admin so compliant moves auto-heal; otherwise it turns into whack-a-mole. Might be worth piloting if Toolbox isn’t the main offender, @lisa_henderson47.
Pretty sure a lot of that 8% tied to the ‘folder restructure’ came from drag‑drop; we stopped it by forcing all restructures through Copy Tree/Move Tree (Include drawings, let PDM update refs) and kicking off a Task Scheduler convert-to-latest re‑save on the moved set. Dangling refs fell to near zero and downstream stayed happy because the drawings and where‑used followed. @lisa_henderson47’s library pin is solid, but the move gate did the heavy lifting.
We cut this by forcing SOLIDWORKS to save new/in‑context parts to the assembly’s folder via the Admin Image (External References: “Create new referenced documents in: same as top‑level assembly”); refs stay relative so restructures don’t break. Pair with @dmiller93’s outside‑root check — do you need exceptions for vendor parts?