Breaking assembly family table into individual instances

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
December 10, 2011
2 replies
16269 views

Hi,

I wonder if there is a way to save the istances of an generic assembly in individual assemblies

Ex:

I have an assembly with 5 instances. Every instance contain components that belongs to other generic.

I would like to know if there is a way for these 5 instances to be saved into individula assemblies with no connection to the previous generic and also the subcomponents that are used in instances that belongs to other generic to be saved individual without any coection to the generic.

In few words i'm not allowed to use anymore the instaces. All assemblies, parts are not allowed to have any instance or to be an instance of a generic.

I'm asking this because I have around 300 generics with ~40 instances. In total if I'm going to break the family table will be a huge number >20.000 models.

I found a toolkit program that is able to break the family table in separatly models but it's able to do just for level1 and not for subcomponents(level2)

Any ideea how I ca break these femily tables before 2012?

Thx,

CC

Toolkit

B

BrianMartin

13-Aquamarine

Hi Claudiu...

By deleting the family tables, the instances should become standalone. However, this can be complicated by Windchill or PDMlink. Are you using Windchill (PDMLInk or Pro/INTRALINK) to manage your models? Let me know so I can tailor a solution to your specific needs.

The bigger question is... WHY can't you use family tables anymore? This smacks of some management decision that "family tables are bad" thus requiring you break all these instances apart. Family tables are tremendously powerful and infinitely useful. Breaking them apart after you have 20,000 models relying on them is, in my humble opinion, a criminal misuse and misunderstanding of Pro/ENGINEER.

But... most designed I know have worked under a boss who didn't "get it". I've had to break apart my own tables before and it's painful. Write back and I'll try to help you.

Thanks!

-Brian

C

ClaudiuCraciun

Author

1-Visitor

Even me I don't understand why a proe functionality like Family table or interchange assembly need to be destroied before to upload everithing in PDM (windchill)

The answer was when a projects is checked out from the commons space is not good to see all the instances in case that you are using just one.

I taking this as a true. Who decided this seems that has years of experience with Winchill with multiple facilities and this is what he recommened.

Now I have to find a way to broke all these family tables

B

BrianMartin

13-Aquamarine

Hi Claudiu...

The person who decided this is... wrong. I'm almost vibrating in my seat trying to stem the torrent of insults I want to hurl at this person. But in trying to be constructive, let's discuss his assertions instead:

- You do NOT need to pull out all instances of a family table if you're just using ONE. There's a configuration setting in PDMLink to control this.

- You can use display filters in your workspace to remove instances from the workspace listing. Thus, you don't have to see ANY instances!

- The loss of interchange groups and family table functionality hurt you many times over... slowing your design processes and complicating your engineering work.

The person with multiple years of experience using Windchill at multiple facilities sounds like a WINDCHILL person, not a Pro/ENGINEER person. He doesn't sound like ANY kind of designer or engineer. If he has any type of experience with these tools, he'd understand what he's asking is really, really silly. I'm sure PTC consultants would back you up in this. He's effectively saying you can't use the tools you've been given because "its not good" to have instances in your workspace (or project). Who says this?? Poorly trained people say this. People who do not understand the tool say this. Experienced, reasonable, educated people do not advocate this kind of thing.

I wish I worked with you. I'd be the first to fight against this policy. Then I'd move up the chain of command until someone listened. I've gone head-to-head with Windchill guys, managers, and "experienced" IT people at a previous employers for the good of the company. They lose. If you can get a reasonable person to hear your concerns and understand what is being sacrificed, you have a chance to prevent this needless destruction of your models.

ANYWAY... you asked how to break them apart. From your email I'm assuming you're using Windchill PDMLink and Projectlink. Here's what I'd do. I did some testing and it works.

First, call up all 5 instances of your top level assembly into memory. Next, open the generic assembly. Go to Tools>Family Table>Edit (inside table tool)>Delete Entire Table. Exit the family table. You'll see messages scroll up the screen saying your 5 instances are no longer table-driven. Save the generic and save all 5 assemblies. This will create 6 standalone assemblies (one for the generic and one for each instance).

Next, start opening up your lower level tables and removing THOSE tables, too. Save again at each layer. If you start at the top level assdembly and work down to the lower levels you'll be able to successively break apart the tables. This only works for instances you have IN SESSION.

This technique will work although it can be painstaking.

Still, a better technique is to put together some type of spreadsheet or chart or email detailing how much money the company will LOSE due to this wrongheaded idea. In this economy if you can prove the company is wasting money performing all this extra work... and wasting the value of the expensive Pro/ENGINEER software tools, you'll catch someone's attention. If not, something much deeper is wrong at your company.

Good luck... truly!

-Brian