File location & Mass Properties

Steve,

I'm working with WF4 so some of the terminology or locations may have changed. Hopefully the principles will still be the same.

1. Pro/E assemblies only save the component names, not their location. When you open an assembly it will look in the directory the assembly was opened from; then the working directory (I think that's the right way round) and then it will look through the locations in a search path file (ours is called search.pro) which you can set a pointer to in config.pro (search_path_file z:\search.pro).

If you have standard part directories, or you pull parts from multiple different projects (as we do) then these locations should be listed in search.pro. Be aware, however, that having a very long search path can slow down certain operations such as new file and rename; and the order you list locations is the order Pro/E will look through them, so put little-used ones at the end. Also, Pro/E requires any filename to be unique within the search path - you can't have two models with the same name. If you do somehow achieve this, Pro/E will just open the first one it finds and try to put that in your assembly.

As a side benefit, if you use File->Open you can simply type a filename (e.g. widget.prt, tool.drw) and Pro/E will look through the search path and open the file without you needing to navigate to its location.

2. You can change the units set for the entire model, via Edit->Setup in Wildfire and earlier. However, think carefully about which units you want to use, and why. For a long time we used mm, kg, sec; but when we started using Mechanica this meant that force would be defined in kg.mm/s^2, which I think is mN. Instead, we switched to mm, N, s, which gives mass in tonnes (as you have) but means that forces are in N and stresses are directly in MPa.

To 'fix' the reported weight on a drawing, we use the relation WEIGHT = PRO_MP_MASS*1000 in our start part and then display &WEIGHT in the drawing border.

hi

i tried to add searching path before, and found that for search path g:, pro-e just search files in g:\ not in g:\xx.

for the unit, choose setup-unit management, copy the one you are using and edit to set the unit as you wish for mass ...

th default setting fot mmns for mass is tonne.

hope it helps

linda