If you’re upgrading SOLIDWORKS Professional or Premium to a newer version – and you’re using a customised SOLIDWORKS Toolbox – you must make sure the Toolbox version is set to update to the same version of SOLIDWORKS during installation. We sometimes receive support calls from users that have performed this step incorrectly and can no longer access their Toolbox. If that sounds like you, you’ll be pleased to know it’s an easy fix!
Here’s how to manually update the SOLIDWORKS Toolbox
To choose the best solution, we need to find out what version you are updating the Toolbox from, and what version are you updating it to. This is important because if you are updating a Toolbox from release 2014 (or previous) to 2015 (or above), there are additional steps that we need to go through because the file architecture for the Toolbox changed with the 2015 release.
Let’s start with a simple example where the Toolbox file architecture does not change. So this could be updating SOLIDWORKS 2012 to 2013, or SOLIDWORKS 2018 to 2019 etc.
Step 1. Take a copy of your SOLIDWORKS Toolbox (it’s always good to have a backup!)
Step 2. Browse to the folder C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS <latest version>\SOLIDWORKS\Toolbox\data utilities
Within that folder, you will see a tool called ‘UpdateBrowserDatabase.exe’ in 2015 (& above) or ‘UpdateBrowserData.exe’ in 2014 (& previous).
Step 3. Right click the ‘UpdateBrowserDatabase.exe’ or ‘UpdateBrowserData.exe’ depending on which version you are using and select run as administrator.
This will launch the tool:
Step 4. Click the browse button (‘…’) and select the database file to update. In the below example, it’s ‘C:\SOLIDWORKS Data 2015\lang\english\swbrowser.sldedb’, this will vary depending on version.
Please note in SOLIDWORKS 2015 and above the database file has the extension ‘.sldedb’. In SOLIDWORKS 2014 and below, the file extension is ‘.mdb’.
Once the database has been selected it will display the database version and the update version. This is what you are updating the versions from and to.
In SOLIDWORKS 2015 & 2016 we have an additional ‘updating database tool’ option. This allows us to choose which version we wish to update to.
Step 5. Click ‘Update’ and you’re done.
Further step if upgrading to 2015 or above
As mentioned above, the file architecture for the Toolbox changed with the 2015 release of SOLIDWORKS from the file extension ‘.mdb’ to ‘.sldedb’. Therefore, if we are upgrading SOLIDWORKS 2014 (or previous) to SOLIDWORKS 2015 (or above) we must convert the ‘.mdb’ file to ‘.sldedb’.
Here’s how you do it:
Step A. Browse to the folder folder ‘C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS <latest version>\SOLIDWORKS\Toolbox\data utilities’.
Within that folder you will see a tool called ‘Database Converter.exe’.
Step B. Right click the ‘Database Converter.exe’ tool and select ‘Run as administrator’,
This will launch the tool:
Step C. Select your source Database file This will be the ‘SWbrowser.mdb’ file you wish to convert to ‘.sldedb’
Step D. Click ‘Convert’. This will create a ‘SWBrowser.sldedb’ file in the same location as the ‘SWBrowser.mdb’
Now you have the ‘SWBrowser.sldedb’ file, its possible to update this to version 2015 (or above) using steps 1 – 5.
We hope you found that useful!
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