Limitation of the number of characters in an equation

SOLIDWORKS SW General
1

Hello to all,

I made myself a library feature with nested if functions for wave inserts for retaining rings. Since I covered the dimension range from 3 mm to 150 mm, the equation became very long. The longest equation had something like 2500 characters!
There were no error messages or other problems when creating and also none when using the library feature. Also the recalculation when changing the shaft diameter and the necessary change of the dimensions of the recess went very quickly and reliably.
But…
after a few days we had a problem with some parts where the library feature was applied, that the parts could not be opened in SWX 2020 SP5.
We sent the parts to DS for repair, unfortunately there was no feedback on what caused the files to fail.

What is amazing is that the unrepaired parts can be opened in SWX 2021 SP5.1 without any problem.

My dealer could not give me an explanation and only said that maybe something was improved.

Therefore my questions:
a: does anyone know if there is a limit on the number of characters to the right of the equal sign in equations.
b: Has anything been changed / improved in SWX 2021 regarding this issue?

I would like to build the equation differently, so that not all values from 3 to 150 mm are in one equation, but break the equations into several sections. But for this I would have to work with global variables, and that again does not work with Bibliotheks feature.

Is there another way to reliably automate operations with such a high number of possibilities?
Would the use of a macro feature be the better choice here?

I know an equation with such a high number of characters is a bit crazy, but this was also more or less a test to learn the limits of library feature.

2

Wow, really? That’s the answer they gave you? Don’t leave it at that, they’re just being lazy. Sometimes you have to be a bit pushy to get answers

3

Not sure on number of characters in equation (as per SPR 206859 it says 512 though) but have you looked at using design table instead?

4

Hello Deepak,

until now I have not worked with configurations for the library features, because I have the goal to build the library feature so that they are “intelligent” and automatically select the correct dimension.
I have just looked if there is a possibility to control the selection of the configuration with equations, but so far I have not found anything that goes in this direction.
Do you know a function that makes it possible to automatically select the configuration depending on a dimension?

The description in SPR 206859 is interesting. Remains the question whether the limit of max. 512 does not exist any more, if one does not receive any more error message when exceeding the limit.

5

Configuration publisher may be the answer you need. You can correlate it to selecting a toolbox item configuration based on dimensions.

6

Today i got the following information from DSS:

Our legacy Basic Script code had a hard limit on characters on a single command line of 512 including all decorations.
Practically that led to an effective limit which was 25 characters shorter.

Now we are using VBA.
The command limit is 65535 characters for VBA".

Please keep in mind that performance will be very slow in processing any dimension names which appear in that string.