Create eDrawings

You can schedule tasks to export SOLIDWORKS documents as eDrawings® files. You can export individual files or all files of a specified type within a folder.

You can specify one or more files or folders, but you cannot specify both files and folders in the same task.

Creating a Create eDrawings Task

To create a Create eDrawings task:

  1. Click Create eDrawings on the sidebar, or click Tasks > Create eDrawings.
  2. In the dialog box, type a new title for the task or leave the default in Task title.
  3. Select the files or folders you want to export as eDrawings files:
    • To select files:
      1. Under Task files or folders, click Add File.
      2. Select the types of files to export in Files of type.
      3. Browse to the file you want to export, then click Open.
      4. Repeat steps a, b, and c to select additional files.
    • To select folders:
      1. Under Task files or folders, click Add Folder.
      2. Browse to the folder that contains the files to export, then click OK.
      3. Under File Name or Type, click in the row that contains the folder you just added, then select the type of file to export.
      4. Repeat steps a, b, and c to select additional folders.
      5. If you do not want to include subfolders, clear Include subfolders.
      To delete a file or folder from the list, click its number in the leftmost column, then click Delete.
  4. Under Task output folder, select one of the following to specify where to store the exported files:
    Option Description
    Same as original file  
    This folder Type the path to the folder, or click to browse to the folder.

Scheduling the Task

To schedule the task:

  1. Under Task schedule, set:
    Option Description
    Running mode Specifies how often the task runs. Select Once, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly.
    Start time  
    Start date  
  2. Click Options to set eDrawings export options.
  3. Click Advanced if you want to change task options such as backup file location and time-out duration.
  4. Click Finish.
    The task and its title, scheduled time, scheduled date, and status appear in the Tasks panel. The status of the task is Scheduled.
    To run a scheduled task, your computer must be on at the scheduled start time. The SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler window does not need to be open. If your computer is off at the scheduled start time, the task runs when you turn your computer on.

    At the scheduled start time, the task is initiated. If the task acts on more than one file, a subtask is generated for each file. If you selected Backup task files in Task Options, a backup copy of each file is saved to a .zip file. Then each file is exported as an eDrawings file. When the task completes, the status changes to Completed.

    After the task completes, click Completed to see the SOLIDWORKS Task Scheduler Report.
    If your backup files include Unicode file paths, use a zip file extraction application that supports UTF-8 encoding.