Best Practices - Preventing Document Mixups

SOLIDWORKS stores an internal ID with every document to ensure that, although files may have identical names, there still exists a method to distinguish a difference. In the case you either rename a component the same, or delete and recreate, the ID will not match and SOLIDWORKS will inform you of this with the following message.

The option to disable this warning prompt can be enabled by clicking "Don't show again", but this is a strongly discouraged practice. If you have managed to disable this option, or want to verify this prompt will display on your system, we have included two different options for verifying (and distributing) this setting.

Messages/Errors/Warnings

Any time a dialog message is suppressed by clicking "Do not show again", the dialog message will be shown in the "Dismissed Messages" section of the SOLIDWORKS options in SOLIDWORKS. This location is found at Tools > Options > System Options > Messages/Errors/Warnings and is a per user setting.

To allow this message to show, check the box next to the message labeled "Referenced document has non-matching internal ID" and select OK.

Registry

If you need to verify the setting for a large user base, it may be inconvenient to access all machines with all user accounts to verify the message setting. It may simply be easier to push the setting via a registry file to all user accounts to ensure the setting is the same network-wide.

The registry key that needs to be set would be as follows:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SolidWorks\Solidworks 20XX\General\DontAskAgainOptions\IDS_VISTA_EXT_DOC_REF_MISMATCH_TITLE

Set to a value of FFFFFFFF to enable the message.

Please make sure this registry key setting is set for your specific version of SOLIDWORKS. The BOLD indicates where you may need to update your SOLIDWORKS version.

Important: Serious problems may occur if you make incorrect changes to the registry. We advise you to make a backup of your registry using the information here. We advise you to work with your IT administrators when following the procedures below.