Update Files

You can schedule tasks to update SOLIDWORKS documents. The Update Files task rebuilds the specified documents with any changes made since the last time the model was rebuilt. You can update 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 an Update Files Task

To create an Update Files task:

  1. Click Update Files on the sidebar, or click Tasks > Update Files.
  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 update:
    • To select files:
      1. Under Task files or folders, click Add File.
      2. Select the types of files to update in Files of type.
      3. Browse to the file to update, 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 update, then click OK.
      3. Under File Name or Type, click in the row that contains the folder you just added, then select the types of files to update.
      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.

Scheduling a 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 Advanced if you want to change task options such as backup file location and time-out duration.
  3. 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 sub-task 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 updated. 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.