Best Practices for replacing Family Tables?

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
April 15, 2016
2 replies
7849 views

We have a bunch of models that are using Family Tables that really shouldn't be family tables and we're considering alternatives. Some of the alternative methods we are looking at are:

Inheritance Features
Flexible Features for assemblies with springs and things.
Leaving some Family Tables for hardware type items.
Mechanism for assemblies that need to show multiple positions of moving parts.

Does anyone have any best practices, lessons learned, advice, presentations, or documents that they would be willing to share?

We do use Windchill for our PDM/PLM solution, so that will need to be considered as well.

-marc

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Assembly Design

B

bradlawrence

1-Visitor

We avoid family tables if all possible, Windchill and family tables have a tendency to cause issues sometimes especially for CAD driven BOM's. We have tons of legacy family tables and I break them up on as needed basis, especially when the instances are at different revisions.

The method is to checkout the whole family table into a workspace, then bring up in session the generic and instances you want to make standalone, this is very important!. Then delete those instances out of family table. Save the family table. Then in the workspace you will see the instances are not part of the family table, but now standalone parts. Check the whole family table and standalone parts back in.

Downside, other users will see those old instances "out of date" in their workspaces. They will not be able to update, they have to delete the old instances out of workspace and add the new standalone parts back in. Or just start a new workspace and bring in everything fresh again which is a cleaner method.

M

mdebower

Author

18-Opal

Brad,

We have been breaking up family tables when we can as well. I agree with you that there are numerous issues with Windchill and Family Tables. Like you said we have a lot of legacy data that needs to be dealt with too.

Some of the family tables were created for good reasons, even if misguided. I think we could really help drive the adoption if there were a good proven alternative to the family table instead of just breaking them up into separate models. Like inheritance features / models for example.

-marc