SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional Application Programming Interface

SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional’s application programming interface (API) gives you access to most of the functionality in SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional. For example, you can programmatically:

• Manage:
  • Vaults and their views
  • Users and user groups
  • File and folder cards and their views
  • File references
  • Card variables and attributes
  • Workflows, states, and transitions
  • Tasks
• Access:
  • Vault items
  • History of files and folders
  • Versions and revisions of files
  • Templates installed in the vault
• Search vaults and browse vault folders
• Check files in and out of the vault
• Send messages to users
• Create add-ins

See the Release Notes for the updates made to recent releases of the SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional API.

Applications 

You can write two types of applications using this API:

1. Stand-alone applications (.exe and .dll) that are called by other programs to use various features of SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional.
2. Add-in applications that are called by SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional when users perform actions like check in or check out of a file, add a file to the vault, change the state of a file, etc.

Primary Assembly Interops

SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional includes two primary interop assemblies (also called interops) for use with stand-alone SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional applications:

• EPDM.Interop.epdm.dll
• EPDM.interop.EPDMResultCode.dll

The interops are stored in the top folder of your SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional installation.

• 32-bit interops are shipped with the 32-bit version of SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional.
• 64-bit interops are shipped with the 64-bit version of SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional.

See Using .NET Framework 4.0 in Stand-alone Applications for more information.

See Also

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