Philip Stears | DriveWorks

DriveWorks Extensibility

Two months ago I blogged about building plug-ins for DriveWorks, unfortunately a couple of people have tried the tutorial since we shipped SP1 and had less than stellar luck.

The bad news is we made a bit of mistake with one of the configuration files we shipped in SP1 which causes problems for plug-ins. Sorry :-(

The good news is; it is really really easy to fix, just download the following zip file which contains one file called "DriveWorksAdministrator.exe.config":

http://www.philipstears.net/driveworks/SP1ConfigFile.zip

To apply the fix, just overwrite the file of the same name in your DriveWorks installation directory, e.g. "C:\Program Files\DriveWorks\6.1\Administrator\" and the next time you start DriveWorks you'll be able to load your plug-ins :-)

The other good news is that this issue is fixed in SP2 which will be shipping very soon now.

DriveWorks Extensibility

I posted on my previous blog about extensibility but I just wanted to make the point again for anyone that didn't see it.

Extensibility is one of the coolest features in the latest version of DriveWorks - DriveWorks 6. It is possible to create plug-ins to DriveWorks which can do virtually anything that DriveWorks itself can - some examples being; adding support for PDM systems other than PDMWorks Workgroup and PDMWorks Enterprise, automating DriveWorks Server to create new specifications, automatic model printing, and a whole raft of others.

I published a draft some time ago of a walk-through of creating a very simple plug-in for DriveWorks, which at some point towards the end of this month I will update, but, for anyone that really wants to get started now - here you go:

http://www.philipstears.net/driveworks/plugintutorial.zip

It covers the very basics, and by the time I am finished it will hopefully walk-through all of the core components of the DriveWorks API from Configuration through to customising the specification process.

One thing is worth noting when it comes to DriveWorks - I firmly believe in a hands-off zero-programming approach, and I believe DriveWorks enables this in a way that no other solution in this space can boast. That said, we do appreciate that sometimes you just need to go the extra mile, and we try very hard to be as flexible as possible, hence extensibility and our support for macros.

As it turns out, zero is a relative term.