General Drawing Productivity Pack (DPP) Instructions
  1. View, Sketch, and Annotation names are case-insensitive and inclusive unless otherwise specified. (In Other Words (IOW): A value of “View1” will work with both “DRAWING VIEW10” and “DrAwInG vIeW1”)
  2. Custom Property Names are case-insensitive unless otherwise specified (IOW: “PPTABLEINFO” and “ppTableInfo” will both work).
  3. Custom Property values are generally comma-delimited and repeatable (“View1,8,6,View2,2,2,View3,4,3”) unless otherwise specified.
  4. Custom Property values may be literal entries “View1,8,6” or file references such as “c:\textfile.txt” that contain the literal values.
  5. SolidWorks has a custom property value maximum length of 512 characters (or something like that), so using a text file reference allows for values with larger lengths. When a text file is used, all repeatability comes from the contents of the text file.
  6. Using a text file reference is generally recommended as it makes the repeated iterations of designing the Drawing easier to perform.
  7. On occasion you may need to rename or reorder Annotations or Views to eliminate conflicts. (“View10” before “View1” would process “Drawing View10” twice.)
  8. A log file is created (replaced) in your %temp% folder each time the DPP runs. It contains considerable diagnostic information, describing exactly what properties were found, how they were processed, and what results should occur from the processing.
  9. In some cases, there are multiple ways to accomplish a specific goal. For example: Annotations may be hidden with “ppDimensionImport”, “ppConfigureAnnotations”, “ppAnnotationVisibility”, or “ppLayerInfo”… depending on the particular situation.