Linking your Notes to a Subassembly’s Custom Properties

Solidworks Drawings can link notes and balloons to different component custom properties in your assembly, but if you’ve ever tried to link a note to a subassembly’s custom properties, you may have noticed that you can’t actually choose the subassembly in the “Link to Property” window. The good news is that you CAN link a note to a subassembly’s custom properties, you just need to use the “Select Other” command in your drawing to select the subassembly instead of the subcomponent.

Let’s take a look at the subassembly below:

Here, we want to create a drawing view that links to the subassembly’s custom properties shown below:

That property shown above is created at the subassembly level, not at the part level. So it only exists for the “Alignment Test” subassembly shown above.

If we make a drawing and try to link a note to that “Hello” property, we’ll see that the “Link to Property” window will automatically select the component of the subassembly, instead of the subassembly itself.

Generally, to resolve this, you would simply highlight what’s in the “Selection” box and click on the correct component in your drawing view, but doing this will only add another subcomponent into that Selection box, not the subassembly as a whole. To select the subassembly, we’ll have to highlight what’s in the “Selection” box and then right click on the drawing view and click on “Select Other”:

This should bring up the “Select Other” tool:

From here, we can choose the correct selection we want, here the very first option is what will give us the subassembly. Once we’ve selected it, we can see that the “Hello” custom property shows up correctly in the “Link to Property” window:

If you’re still having trouble linking your notes to your subassembly’s custom properties, feel free to call Hawk Ridge Systems Technical Support at 877.266.4469 (US) or 866.587.6803 (Canada) or submit a support email to support@hawkridgesys.com.