My apologies for disappearing. On literally a whim my wife and I bought a house in Raleigh, NC and moved from Williamsburg, VA. Both my children are in the Raleigh/Durham area.
Anywho, the reason for the post.
Once uopn a time far away and long ago, I seem to remember that someone was building a SolidWorks tool that would read down the feature tree of a part and create an xml file (I think) that could be used to generate the part in a completely different version of SolidWorks.
My first question is:
Was this a dream or hallucination (I could be an AI bot for all I know)?
If it wasn’t a dream/hallucination, where, who, what, etc, etc, etc.
It’s been talked about various times in various iterations of the SOLIDWORKS forums. Around 2000, CADML was all the rage for this sort of thing, but it has since morphed into more of a ‘use code to create 3D models’ tool, not ‘use XML to describe existing 3D models’.
You’re right, there was some effort at one time to read the feature tree using API and storing all the features and parameters in some type of external text file so that a lower version of SW could take those and rebuild the part from the ground up. It was called Backworks. I think all development stalled when SW introduced native back-saving up to 2 versions.
There’s a crazy expensive utility from Dassault called Elysium: